(Frontiers of Theory) Freud, Sigmund - Freud, Sigmund - Smith, Robert Rowland-Death-drive - Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art-Edinburgh University Press (2010)

The Frontiers of Theory

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan Death-Drive
Death-Drive
This series brings together internationally respected gures to comment on and re-
describe the state of theory in the twenty-rst century. It takes stock of an ever-
expanding eld of knowledge and opens up possible new modes of inquiry within it, Freudian Hauntings
identifying new theoretical pathways, innovative thinking and productive motifs.
in Literature and Art
Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art
Robert Rowland Smith Robert Rowland Smith
This is a rich and fascinating work. Smith provides a lucid, probing and astute
Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

overview of the death drive in Freud, but also leads the reader into strange and
compelling new terrain. This is an important new contribution to a topic that remains
controversial in psychoanalysis and culture more generally.
Professor Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex
Sinuously argued and vividly expressed, Death-Drive will appeal both to beginners
and to seasoned readers of psychoanalysis and literature. Rarely has death been
discussed with such vitality.
Maud Ellmann, Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies, University of
Notre Dame
Robert Rowland Smith takes Freuds work on the death-drive and compares it with
other philosophies of death Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida, in particular. He also
applies it in a new way to literature and art to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina
Fritsch, among others. He asks whether artworks are dead or alive, if artistic creativity
isnt actually a form of destruction, and whether our ability to be seduced by ne words
means we dont put ourselves at risk of death. In doing so, he proposes a new theory
of aesthetics in which artworks and literary texts have a death-drive of their own.
Robert Rowland Smith

Robert Rowland Smith has written widely on philosophy, psychoanalysis and
literature, including Derrida and Autobiography.
Edinburgh University Press

22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Edinburgh
ISBN 978 0 7486 4039 3
Jacket illustration: Rear Window by Ori Gersht.
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Jacket design: Michael Chatfield
Approximate Pantone colours: Light green 5513, spine 5473

Death-Drive
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Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger,

Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer
Timothy Clark
Dream I Tell You

Hlne Cixous
Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human

Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius

Jacques Derrida
Insister of Jacques Derrida

Hlne Cixous
Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of

Jacques Derrida
Geoffrey Bennington
Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Reading and Responsibility

Derek Attridge
Of Jews and Animals

Andrew Benjamin
The Romantic Predicament

Paul de Man
The Book I Do Not Write

Hlne Cixous
The Paul de Man Notebooks

Paul de Man
Veering: A Theory of Literature

Nicholas Royle
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Death-Drive
Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art
Edinburgh University Press
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Robert Rowland Smith Ltd, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Adobe Sabon

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4039 3 (hardback)
The right of Robert Rowland Smith Ltd

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Note on the Text viii
Series Editors Preface ix
Authors Preface xi
Introduction 1
1. Memento Mori 29
2. The Death-Drive Does Not Think 48
3. A Subject Is Being Beaten 67
4. White Over Red 82
5. Literature Repeat Nothing 108
6. A Harmless Suggestion 134
7. The Rest of Radioactive Light 166
Postscript: Approaching Death 180
Index 207
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List of Illustrations
Mark Rothko, White Over Red (1957) 102

Samuel Beckett, photographed by John Minihan (1985) 173
Katharina Fritsch, Mnch (1999) 193
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Acknowledgements
This book has benefited in various ways from the thoughts, company,
criticism, support, interrogation, love or patience of many people. These
include Clare Birchall, the late Malcolm Bowie, Clare Connors, Yuli
Goulimari, Gerard Greenway, Gary Hall, Myfanwy Lloyd, Eleanor
Malaurie, Lois McNay, Martin McQuillan, Anthony Mellors, Helen
Moorhouse, Paul Myerscough, Lydia Rainford, Frank Romany, Steve
Rose, Nick Royle, Polly Russell, Charlotte Smith, Kathy Smith, Rowley
Smith, Roger Starling, Jonty Tiplady, Jonah Ungar, Shane Weller, Rob
White and Sarah Wood. I thank them all.
For the illustration in Chapters 4 and 7 and the Postscript I am grateful

for permission to produce as follows:
Chapter 4: Mark Rothko, White Over Red (1957) 1998 Kate Rothko
Prizel and Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009.
Chapter 7: Samuel Beckett, photographed by John Miniham (1985)

John Minihan.
Postscript: Katharina Fritsch, Mnch (1999) DACS 2009.
I dedicate the book to the memory of Jacques Derrida.
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Note on the Text
Several chapters have appeared in earlier versions:

Memento Mori, in Angelaki, 3: 3 (1998), 4557, and in Journal of the
Society for Existential Analysis, 10: 2 (1999), 6382.
The Death Drive Does Not Think, in Common Knowledge, 5: 1
(Spring 1996), 5975, and, in abridged form, in Post-Theory, eds M.
McQuillan, G. MacDonald, R. Purves and S. Thomson (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 16175.
A Subject Is Being Beaten, in Angelaki, 3: 1 (1998), 18796.
White Over Red, as Art, Death and the Perfection of Error, in
Angelaki, 7: 2 (2002), 14359.
Literature Repeat Nothing, in The Question of Literature, ed.
Elizabeth Beaumont-Bissell (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2002), pp. 20731.
References
The most frequent reference throughout the book is to the following

work:
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the General
Editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Alix Strachey and
Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1964). Twenty-four volumes.
This work will be cited in the following format: SE, VI, p. 217.
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Series Editors Preface
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends
and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been estab-
lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures
of auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a
more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thoughts own limits?
Theory is a name that traps by an aberrant nomial effect the trans-
formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in
an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a
name, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisons such think-
ing. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon
Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of
Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,
this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges
complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.
It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in
the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers
of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is
interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of cross-
ing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,
this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued
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x Death-Drive
exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters

modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims
to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.
Martin McQuillan
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Authors Preface
Freud located the death-drive first in the psyche of the individual and
later in the tendency of whole civilisations. An instinct that is ancient
and, although ultimately organic, not reducible to biology compels
or propels the individual and the civilisation into the arms of death.
The instinct is internal rather than imposed suicidal, for short.
Unconsciously, we solicit and pursue our own death. It is this inalienable
instinct which, in tandem with the instinct of Eros the instinct for life,
for energy, for bonding, for procreation is definitive of the species as
such, and holds such weight with Freud because it offers the master key
to understanding human life and behaviour.
The theory of the death-drive is extraordinary controversial,
counter-intuitive and even by Freuds admission highly speculative and
much of the text that follows worries at Freuds assumptions, arguments
and conclusions. In this sense I add modestly to the already large litera-
ture on the subject. But my focus is not on the life of human beings per
se: it is on literature, painting, sculpture and photography. Now, readers
of Freud well know that he thought much in print about Shakespeare,
Leonardo da Vinci and Hellenic sculpture, among other things, so the
project of applying Freud to literature and art is hardly new (and many
have tried since). So whats different about what I have to say?
Where Freud will by and large interpret a work of art as he will
interpret a dream, as an artifact or token of the individuals psyche, a
set of coded messages about its authors unconscious, my hypothesis is
that artworks themselves can be seen as possessed of, or perhaps by, an
unconscious of their own. I am saying that Freuds theory of the death-
drive can be applied to artworks even though they are manifestly not
organic or biological in the way that human beings are. After all, can an
artwork die if it was never alive?
That question isnt entirely rhetorical. In fact, I take it at face value
in the last chapter proper. Artworks do tend to live on; their longevity,
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xii Death-Drive
their ability to outlive their creator, is possibly axiomatic: so what is

the status of their living on and how, justly, can it be told apart from a
death? That is one line of argument from many in the chapters ahead, all
of which explore the possibility that the death-drive is likely to be found
as much in works of art as in the individual or collective psyche, and
that, although it is humans who produce those works of art, they do not
finally determine them. The death-drive finds its locus in the artwork as
much as in the psychically vested human that has given birth to it.
In such unlikely places, I propose, the death-drive appears, but not
as the vehicle or empty vessel of their authors death instincts, nor as an
observable phenomenon. In Shakespeares Macbeth, for example (see
Chapter 6 below), there is a deathly credulity or suggestibility operat-
ing on two levels. The first pertains to its hero. Macbeths belief in the
prophecy of the witches that he will become king makes him vulnerable
to his own death, more vulnerable even than when on the battlefield.
Death ensues not from an empirical threat even if Macbeth is empiri-
cally slaughtered at the end but from the credit he affords the witches
in his moment of transference with them. This is death in the form of
rhetoric, if you will, artful or beguiling words based on nothing sub-
stantial, that threaten to undo the very substance of the person who lets
himself hear them. Then, at a second, structural or metastructural level,
the play as literature opens itself up too, by allowing and giving credit
to its own tragic story. This letting-happen on the part of literature
takes place because literature exempts itself from the laws of knowl-
edge, truth, fact and so on. Literature, like rhetoric (which may not be
different) and other arts, belongs to the order of belief or faith rather
than reason, and is therefore a suggestible genre in principle. It exposes
itself to the possibility of its own destruction, its own coming to an end,
its random or autotelic self-interruptions and self-shapings. Because it
believes in anything, it cannot always legislate against or discern that
which might destroy it; yet it reserves the right to cut itself, cut itself off,
cut itself short, at any point. It hovers in this free but perilous space. So
the vulnerability not only confronts Macbeth with his own death, it also
determines the very movement of the play as literature.
In order to promote, defend and elaborate my hypothesis, I run it
through many other examples Samuel Beckett, Ian McEwan, Mark
Rothko, Katharina Fritsch, John Minihan but always taking Freuds
late work on the death-drive as my origin, flying back to it, remaking,
disturbing it again. The other axis is formed by some of the wider litera-
ture on death. To add rigour, depth and contrast to the particular read-
ings, I bring into play Heidegger, Pascal, Derrida, Adorno, Durkheim
and Foucault. I look, for example, at Heideggers claim in Being and
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Authors Preface xiii
Time that the character of death is more one of possibility than actual-
ity, and infer that the character of possibility would have to be one of
imagination and rhetoric (these being artistic or aesthetic rather than
existential or ontological categories). Death cannot be experienced as
such, but it can be believed in; indeed it can only be believed in, which
means that the character of death as it relates to humans must be rhe-
torical, a matter of promise or persuasion in the absence of a secure
referent or signified. Just as death comes to us as something other than
an event, so the death-drive arrives not as thought or concept but as
fiction we die partly because we believe we will die or, to paraphrase
Wittgenstein, because we can never reduce the world to a collection of
facts or even things. This is the drive of the death-drive, its persuasive
attractiveness, its seductiveness: beautiful, so to speak, because it cant
be tested or proved.
In sum, the book not only transposes Freudian notions of the death-
drive into the creative realm broadly conceived, it also tries to redefine
death in a new aesthetic sense.
As for the chapters that make it up, they are certainly capable of being
read independently of each other, but they are meant to form a discern-
ible, if not heavily etched out, sequence. The introduction attempts
to do three things: to give a preliminary account of Freuds theory
of the death-drive; to provide a brief review of the literature that has
reflected on that theory; and to set out first thoughts on the relationship
between the death-drive and the aesthetic. The first chapter then goes
back to philosophical basics (insofar as thats ever possible). What is
death, and how do we begin to think about it? What is its status as an
object of thought? I compare and contrast two distinctive and canonic
approaches to the question, that of Pascal and that of Heidegger. For
Pascal, classically, death is an actual event that we suffer. But Heidegger,
as noted above, argues that thinking about death like this only gets you
so far: better to conceive death as a perpetual possibility than an actual-
ity. I enlarge upon Heideggers answer to suggest that the status of death
is more imaginary than real. I do this in order to argue death into the
space of rhetoric or the artistic, where much of the argument of the fol-
lowing chapters takes place; I also seek to show that death cannot be just
another object of thought.
Freud too links implicitly the idea of thinking to the possibility of
death, and having established some philosophical frames of reference
in the previous chapter, I now formally bring in psychoanalytic con-
cepts. One of Freuds propositions concerning the death-drive is that
it manifests itself in the human compulsion to repeat: he argues that
because we havent worked it through we tend to repeat what we dont
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xiv Death-Drive
understand, so in effect repetition acts as a kind of blocker to think-

ing. What does that say about our capacity to make conscious choices
or indeed to think at all? Again we come up against a nexus between
death and something other than reason, something at the darker
limits of understanding. In this respect Freuds work clearly challenges
Enlightenment ideals about reason and choice, and I set his work in the
context of two very different thinkers of the Enlightenment the histo-
rian J. G. A. Pocock and the critical theorist Theodor Adorno in order
to draw out some implications.
That leads to questions of what counts as rational or irrational behav-
iour. On the surface, the death-drive cannot be rational: who in their
right mind would ever wish for death? Is that really what Freud is talking
about? And if so, why does he so rarely mention suicide? I attempt in
this chapter to clear the matter up before returning to the main theme.
After all, it makes for an odd de-link: on the one hand Freud speaks of
the death-drive, but on the other hand he is virtually silent on suicide.
What is the relationship between them, and where does masochism,
which Freud famously is interested in, fit? I look at the paradoxes of
Freuds position, and set it alongside two other great thinkers of suicide
and punishment, Durkheim and Foucault. When it comes down to it,
Freuds death-drive stops short of destroying life; it prefers a return to a
simple state of inertia that is closer to preservation than annihilation.
White Over Red, the following chapter, doesnt leave it there. It
poses an obvious next question: if Freud largely excludes destruction
from the death-drive, where does it go, and how does it relate to death,
if at all? Freuds answer, in short, is sadism but sadism, though it can
lead to death (both homicide and suicide), seems to stand apart from the
machinery of the death-drive. So is there anything deathly at all about
death, anything that is violent, cruel or annihilating? One of Freuds sub-
tlest readers, Jacques Derrida, has attempted to trace the residual vio-
lence in the death-drive, and he too links it with the aesthetic of a kind. I
examine Derridas argument and then modify it somewhat, taking Mark
Rothkos painting White Over Red as a test case. We emerge with a
classical conjunction of beauty and destruction affirmed, but in a mode
that deviates from classic or classical aesthetics. The deathly beauty
involved never appears as such, meaning that it never becomes available
as an aesthetic object: its doing away with itself before coming to light is
precisely what makes its beauty possible.
The flip side of destruction is creation, allegedly. Chapter 5 sets out to
see if the two are really so different, and whether the nature of creativity
doesnt also fall within the death-drives compass. Freuds writings on art
and literature argue that creative works are the disguises worn by wishes
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Authors Preface xv
that have been repressed, threads to guide us through the maze of the
artists mind back to its creative source. But so too, according to Freud,
are less palatable phenomena such as obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
Yet Freud balks again at making the connection, or at least he will not
make it explicit, so my chapter imagines he had. I use Freudian logic
against Freud, so to speak, reasoning that creative acts, stemming as
they do from the unconscious, cannot be separated so hygienically from
those more rebarbative endeavours that lead not to creation but to its
supposed opposite. Creativity is determined by the death-drive, where
the death-drive is obsessive, compulsive, repetitive, undeviating, mono-
maniacal and so forth. Because of its own emphasis on repetitive, fixated
love, my starting example is Ian McEwans novel Enduring Love, and
from that I go on to explore competing concepts of creativity, not just
from clinical psychoanalysis (Hanna Segal and Christopher Bollas) but
in the work of critics such as Nietzsche and Leo Bersani. I try to show
that, throughout these interventions, creativity never quite succeeds in
slipping the shadow of death.
Among the key aspects of love fixation or love-sickness as exemplified
in McEwans novel is, inevitably, the transference onto the love object,
and transference, as we know, is the supreme mode of the exchange
between psychoanalyst and patient, each using the other as a screen
on which to project positive or negative fantasies. It is a mode in which
the line between subjective and objective becomes faint, where truth
and interpretation cant be disentangled, where past and present merge.
With the suspension of norms which this gives rise to, transference is
nothing if not a breeding-ground for suggestion and suggestibility
the very conditions of rhetoric. Picking up on the earlier chapter on
Heidegger, I now look more squarely at the place of rhetoric and belief
in the composition of death. Enter Macbeth, that character for whom
the suggestion by the witches of accession to the throne is powerful
enough to shake his single state of man and bring forward his own
end. I apply the notion of suggestion to ideology, which works very
much like suggestion, by suggesting ideas and actions to vulnerable
subjects who may be induced to give up their lives to serve a dominant
set of values. Death inhabits the heart of suggestion, as an ever-present
possibility, or, in slightly more political terms, ideology carries with it
the threat of death, offered as the chance for self-sacrifice. In both cases,
death is the telos of seduction; there is a death-drive of rhetoric, of the
art of persuasion, of the formation of words, of the fabrication of images
and, in the case of Macbeth, of the conjuring of fantasies fair and foul,
crown and dagger that hang in the air.
If the preceding chapters relate the death-drive to art works, the final
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xvi Death-Drive
one looks at how artworks relate to their own entropy and survival as
art objects. How are we to understand the fact that they live on after
the demise and/or decease of their creators? Are artworks living or
dead objects or neither? Does their preservation bear comparison with
the minimal metabolic state that Freud envisions in the death-drive? I
begin by reprising the Shakespearean theme from the previous chapter
to discuss how plays such as Macbeth and Hamlet have survived over
time. But to try and get at the real quality of stillness, of minimal change,
I shift to Samuel Beckett not just his writings (particularly the text
Stirrings Still), but also to the famous photographs of Beckett taken
by John Minihan. Through an analysis of a picture of Beckett taken
in Paris, I explain the notion of deathly stillness and its relation to the
artwork, likening it to radioactivity and the preservation of light.
The postscript, finally, offers a somewhat less analytic, more medita-
tive, reflection on many of the themes developed in the chapters before
it, beginning with an encounter with a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch.
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Introduction
Everything that lives, dies. Equally for it doesnt follow everything

that dies will have lived. Rather than being opposites, therefore, its
fairer to say that living and dying depend on each other, each the others
condition. Although we might think of death as standing at the end of
life, as its destination or terminus, it had to be there from the start life
wouldnt have been able to get going unless it had agreed to come to
an end. Life and death make up the two sides of a same coin not two
different coins and, whichever is face up, they belong together.
So why, if everything that lives, dies, might death want a drive? If life
will die anyway, why this supererogatory drive towards death? Even if
it never steps on the gas at all, life will crash, and crash fatally; in fact,
if it presses the brakes all the way, the same result ensues. For the living,
death cant be avoided, so why append to it this apparently gratuitous
force? Which isnt to assume we have any proof of a death drive, like
we have proof of death. Its just a theory, a hypothesis or a speculation,
and Sigmund Freud himself, with whom the death drive is most closely
associated and around whom this book is based, sought, even as he
proposed it, to distance himself somewhat. Of the death drive, nothing
empirically reliable may be said, and in this sense it can be waved away
as superstition.
Even before beginning, then, there are two counts on which we might,
when asked to take the death-drive seriously, demur: just because people
have written about it, it doesnt mean it exists; and in any case, life and
death seem perfectly capable of getting along without it. So what makes
it worthy of attention?
The most obvious answer must be suicide. If we wish to talk cred-
ibly about a drive towards death, it seems sensible to begin with those
people who have killed themselves. They were once alive, meaning they
were due to die anyway, but the certainty of death wasnt strong enough
for them not to bring it forward. While most people never know in
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2 Death-Drive
advance the exact date when they will die, the suicide, by shortening its
horizon, gives the time of death the knowability it lacked and its in
this bringing-forward that a death drive might lie. It might be, in other
words, that suicides are possessed of possessed by that which has
led them to introduce, or accept, an extra force which death, in order to
eventuate, didnt strictly need namely, a death drive. The suicide will
have accelerated towards a death that would have happened regardless,
and for that wilful acceleration, we might reasonably point to a drive;
we might even be able to prove it.
Case closed? Not quite. As well see in the next chapter, the relation-
ship implied between death and time, for example, is one that Heidegger
would have frowned on. The idea that the suicide speeds death up rests
on the false assumption that death waits like an appointment at the end
of your life false because death is essentially accidental. Yes, inevita-
bly, and yes, implacably, death will befall you, and about whether it
will befall you theres no arguing; but when it strikes is another matter:
it can happen any time. Theres nothing about death to make it stick to
that appointment, and it too, like the suicide, can bring on its occur-
rence with horrifying dispatch. But unlike the suicide, who takes the
time of death under his or her own control, so reducing its unpredict-
ability, death refuses to be slated on a calendar and the fact is that
even the would-be suicide can die by accident before the scheduled self-
destruction. The suicides drive towards death can always be pre-empted
by, as it were, the real thing, which doesnt mean the suicide doesnt
have such a drive, but that its less a drive than an intention. Nor does
that deplete its gravity, but it does situate suicide as an act involving
consciousness and choice, for which the notion of a drive and weve
yet to define it might be excessive.
Whats more, that act might not even be one of self-destruction. For
Freud, suicide is technically impossible because, if the psyche is driven
by anything, its the fulfilling of its wishes, and it ought never to wish
for its own end. On the contrary, this central wishing-function what
Freud called Das Ich, and which has always, if unhelpfully, been trans-
lated into English as the ego wants to preserve itself, even to the point
of self-replication, and having defined the ego as this intent for its own
best interests, Freud cannot permit it to do away with itself. So whats
the explanation? Freud says suicide constitutes a form of sadism that has
been trained mistakenly on the self by the self. Normal sadism is exter-
nally directed aggression, but in the case of suicide, it backfires, and it
backfires because the suicidal individual sees in the mirror someone they
hate. This someone is a forgery, but the suicide takes it for a self-portrait
and lashes out. Typically, he or she will have internalised a picture of

Introduction 3
themselves that someone else has of them a damning, spiteful picture

that portrays the individual as worthless. Undeniably, a fatal aggression
then materialises which puts its bearer to death, and even for psychoa-
nalysis, which you might expect to treat suicide more inclusively, self-
murder is a genuine aberration: but the drive, if there was one, began in
the again more normal territory of causing harm to others, that is not
in damaging oneself.
And yet, as above, sadism might be explained without recourse to
what, in the term death drive, sounds like a grand, even a romantic,
metaphysics. Sadism may lead to the death of others or the self, but,
once more, its atmosphere would generally be one of consciousness and
intention, or at least of will the fact that sadistic energy may be directed
at all implies an agency, whereas a drive suggests something not wholly
governable by action or decision. What about the flipside of sadism
masochism? Is it there that we find the death drive? Up to a point.1
Freud bills masochism as an economic problem, or in other words a
matter of degree. Once an individual begins to self-harm, the balance of
sadism (aggression) and masochism (pleasure) can be very hard to call.
But that pleasure might be derived at all from ostensibly detrimental
behaviour gives a first clue to the death drive, and in his great work
Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud elaborates. His premise, as ever,
will be that the ego seeks the fulfilment of its wishes, and by this stage of
his career (1920) that premise has become a principle. Now, principle
is itself a metaphysical as well as a juridical term, indicating a stature
of precedence and authority, so to avert to a beyond of a principle, is
to put that principles pre-eminence into doubt. And as if breaking his
own law, Freud treads very carefully, for what lies beyond the pleasure
principle is a phenomenon, or at least a hypothesis, that both secures
and unfastens the concept of pleasure on which Freud has built the
institution of psychoanalysis. His argument goes broadly as follows.
Beyond the pleasure principle
Pleasure consists in the fulfilling of wishes, and once a wish is fulfilled,

it if only temporarily goes away. Of course, the process wont always
happen so smoothly, and thanks to the pleasure principles great rival,
reality the path to pleasure will all too often have been strewn with
impediments. If you cant always get what you want, its because real
life, in the form of competing interests, gets in the way, which forces
you to go around the houses and defer your gratification. But once you
reach your goal and satisfy your wish, the wish gives over, and its as

4 Death-Drive
this abatement that pleasure may be defined. Rather than excitation,

the pleasure in pleasure comes from relief, from the extirpation of
things that agitate; satisfaction or consummation is achieved and the
fires of wanting quenched the fires of wanting being a reference to
the Buddhist concept of nirvana, to which Freud himself alludes, and
which literally means an extinguishing of the flames. In this sense, pleas-
ure may be redescribed negatively as the absence of unpleasure its
only upon the silencing of the wishs beseeching, petitioning voice that
the pleasure may be heard.
So far so good, maybe, but having made this relatively innocuous
negative definition of pleasure, Freud proceeds to the implication that,
in pursuing such abatement in seeking stillness in seeking pleasure we
are craving something that begins to look like nothing less than death.
Its the inertia that comes with the wishs fulfilment that we covet, the
emptying out of energies that brings a serene calm, and once we start
hunting for this easeful state of Lethe, whats to say it differs from a
solicitation of death? Why not claim the motive for pleasure is a motive
for cessation, a suicide that cant be written off as misdirected sadism?
Lets call a spade a spade.
On its own, however, that might sound less like the naming of a truth
than a mere manipulation of metaphors, that is the end of pleasure is
a repose, death is also a repose, and so theres a metaphorical affinity
between them were not actually talking about death, just something
that resembles it. But his argument wont be so easily dismissed, and
Freud has two further planks in support, the first of which marks the real
innovation for some, the scandal2 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle
and which helps sketch out the definition of a drive. Although exhibited
in the individual psyche or, if not exhibited, at least hinted at in the
patterns of behaviour across a wide sample of individuals, patterns from
which theoretical inferences may be drawn this yearning for a return
to simplicity belongs to the human species as a species. Freud notes the
inanimate world preceded that of the animate there were oceans before
there were fish, mountains before birds and so on and does so as part
of his case-building: the death drive that desire to return to a state of
inertia, that wish on the part of the organic to become inorganic tunes
in to the evolution of that species and aspires to reverse it. In the micro
pursuit of pleasure, a macro force, a cosmology, casts its shadow, and
every time we want something, we are, to some minimal or perhaps
maximal extent, driving at a zero-state that is the best recapitulation we
can manage of the lost era that preceded us, an era in which we had yet
to exist. By nature phylogenetic, the death drive therefore works its spe-
cies-interests through the individual psyche, and that is how the notion

Introduction 5
of a drive begins to earn its appropriateness: it wont be controlled by

the individual that might be its vehicle the drive is the driver.
Sometimes Freuds German term, Todestrieb, gets translated into
English not as death drive but death instincts, and both are helpful
in getting at the primal energy the energy that vanquishes energy
which Freud describes. Drive not just translates but transliterates
Trieb, for its common for the d and v in English to stand in for
the t and b in German, respectively; it wouldnt be an exaggeration
to say that drive and Trieb are the same word even if they have
gone on to accrue different connotations in their national contexts. The
same applies to Tod, where again the t becomes a d in English, and
where the German letter d often gets changed into the English th.
Lexically speaking, the phrase death drive is as close to the compound
Todestrieb as the English translator can get which is why, from now
on, I will hyphenate it as death-drive; I also feel the hyphen works, like
the German compound, to affiliate death with drive as if they were
twins who share a provenance not only lexical, but semantic that, to
an extent, death is a driving, and a drive is deathly. So what of drive
and instincts? Drive carries with it a sense of purpose, motion and
direction something singular and intent, not easily diverted; force
pulses within it, and its in its forcefulness that the question we opened
with, of the death-drives gratuitousness, arises why, if its outcome
was assured, does death need to complement itself with a drive? On the
other hand, instincts, with its Latin rather than Teutonic base, has a
character thats less immediately teleological an instinct neednt be
trained on a target. But, like the drive, the instincts, which are plural,
operate at a level different from consciousness, and that plurality serves
to make them only the more elusive. Perhaps, where drive is abstract or
unallocated, instincts derives from a more organic register, as if proper
to the class of the animate, as if natural; a drive, conceivably, could be
unnatural, technological or perverse even diabolical. Finally, a subtle
gender difference divides them drive the term more usually associated
with the masculine, instincts with the feminine. If I choose to use the
term death-drive, its in the hope that all of these nuances, those of the
drive and those of the instincts, might remain gathered into it.
And of this death-drive Freud is saying that it lies, or might lie,
beyond the pleasure principle. Although we are universally motivated
by the fulfilling of wishes, the fulfilment brings a peaceful satisfaction
implying that what we were wishing for, all along, was death. In talking
here about Freud, however, its important to note that his ideas were
constantly developing, and any text of his gives more a snapshot in time
of those ideas than a consistent position or exposition. At times, death

6 Death-Drive
in Freud appears like pleasures hidden agenda; at other times, like

pleasures opposite, and in his late writings, Freud elevates death and
pleasure into mythic forces, Eros and Thanatos, as if Greek gods in
which guise sometimes they oppose each other, sometimes become the
two facets of the same entity and sometimes are both the same and dif-
ferent. Beneath all permutations, whats important about Beyond the
Pleasure Principle is that, as its title suggests, pleasure may not be the
be-all and end-all, may not after all stand as the principle from which
everything else follows, and that, in death, pleasure meets its match;
where there was one principle, now there are two, even if occasionally
they will appear as the same or merge. It would be crude to say that
Freud makes a turn, an epistemic re-route, from a monadic to a dyadic
system; less crude to say that in death pleasure finds its dominion cir-
cumscribed, or encounters a limit even if that limit marks out, for
pleasure, nothing more than the difference between itself and itself.
But of course, pleasure already had, in the reality principle mentioned
above, a worthy competitor where pleasure went, there went reality,
always ready to tackle it and bring it down to earth. So in circumscrib-
ing pleasure, does death supplant reality? Well, if death is sometimes
the same as pleasure, it would offer opposition to pleasure more wily
than reality where reality operates as a local, if necessary, interruption
to pleasures goals. Reality furnishes pleasure with obstacles to negoti-
ate, which means they can be identified as such, but death never quite
becomes an object for pleasure to apprise, never quite posits itself in the
way that reality, being real, must. In other words, reality might remain
a principle of pleasures frustration an in-principle delay on satisfac-
tion but, compared with the death-drive, it can always be got around.
What reality stipulates is merely the deferral of pleasure a deferral that
merely, by requiring people to adjust to others, produces civilisation
and society but not its extinction.
And what about life? Reality will continue to pluck at pleasures
sleeve, just as ambiguities in the relationship between pleasure and death
will refuse to go away, but why would Freud insist its between death
and pleasure, Thanatos and Eros, that the highest-level psychomachia
takes place? Why not, if death is the true end-all, pit it against the true
be-all, that is, life itself? Why bother with pleasure, which, compared
with life, seems secondary? At best, the question opens another box of
ambiguities; at worst, it bears out the populist view that psychoanalysis
reduces everything to sex. Lets address it. For if death is sometimes
the same as pleasure, so too is life. As his thinking renews itself, Freud
increasingly portrays pleasure as a life energy, a reaching-out in order to
connect and bond with others, which is lifes condition for generating

Introduction 7
more life. Its ulterior motive might be its own death, but its first instinct
will be a solicitation of others, a binding of its otherwise unbound
energy with another being. Which also echoes evolution the shift of the
early organism from unicellular to multicellular status, the imperative of
life its principle, no doubt being to grow. Pleasure, lately crowned
as Eros, is at the very least the servant of life, the modus by which
individuals seek out other individuals in order to add to themselves, to
achieve complexity and increase the chances of their own furtherance;
and at the most, pleasure is life itself, for what is life if not exactly that
polyphiloprogenitive urge?
Life, death, pleasure, reality: while life can more or less be mapped
onto pleasure, death cant be mapped onto reality, but might, if it coin-
cides with pleasure, be mapped onto life. In other words, life, death and
pleasure pretty much overlap. So has Freud not just constructed a vast
tautology? What lies beyond the pleasure principle is the death-drive,
but both are a cultivation of the inertia that life, as the vehicle of pleas-
ure, also pursues. True, en route to this unmissable destination of noth-
ingness (or rather near-nothingness see below), two critical things will
have taken place reality and reproduction, no less but such sublunary
phenomena are sideshows compared to the main event being fought out
by the gods of sex and death. And yet, if the terms can be made so easily
to collapse into one another, it doesnt have to signal a failure of logic. Or
rather, it does but for good reason. One could ask whether, like Jung,
Freud has not, in place of a philosophy or a metaphysics or a theory
what you might, in any case, call a logos created a mythos. Although
the logical distinctions between life, death and pleasure tend to break
down, they find themselves superseded, or outvoiced, by a drama, by a
battle of the immortals, in which forces as in the economic problem
of masochism cited above vie with one another. Its a drama in which
Freud tends to put life and pleasure on one side, and death on the other,
as if these had been underwritten by Sophoclean antagonism, but either
side could always, as in the Hegelian dialectic, see itself in its opponent.
Logically, little difference between Eros and Thanatos obtains, either
one mutating into the stronger or weaker inflection of the same imma-
terial material, but mythographically, or dramatically, they occupy
separate poles between which a compelling tension plays out, and, as
scholars of psychoanalysis like to stress, its in this dynamic, rather
than the topographic, relationship between the terms that their value
comes to lie: if, analytically, life, death and pleasure can be construed as
a worthless tautology, dramatically each term takes on counterfactual
weight in relation to the other. Therefore the psyche becomes the arena
more of drama than reason, and the great bind of psychoanalysis is that

8 Death-Drive
it must apply a rational, preferably a scientific, method to an object the

psyche that it will have established as something other than rational, as
a private theatre of drama or myth. Its as if, while his thinking unfolds,
Freud wants to say its all the same the scientific distinctions create a
ladder that in the end the scientist must throw away. Or, to use those
technical terms, reason, with its distinctions and disaggregations, would
be a defence against this intolerable sameness-in-difference of the
various primary forces.
Not everything can be bound into such a schema, however, be it col-
lapsed logic or expanded myth: what escapes both is destruction. As we
were saying a moment ago, suicide which also, paradoxically, falls
outside the bailiwick of the death-drive avails itself of sadism, and
sadism, in that tireless and sometimes confusing revision by Freud of
his ideas over time, starts to associate itself with the instincts of aggres-
sion where these, again, are themselves both the same and different
from the death-drive. Like sadism, the instincts of aggression typically
orient themselves externally they are the feelings, perhaps, of hatred
or destruction that we channel towards others; they might even lead
to death. But whats curious about the death-drive is that, for its own
purposes, it can largely do without this reservoir of aggression: if the
death-drive is self-destructive (destroying the self, that is, rather than
itself), the capacity for destruction at its disposal produces something
other than nothing. Freud talks about the death-drives conservative
qualities, and the end-state postulated is of a return not to nothingness,
but to a minimum, to a simplicity, to the inorganic stasis that subsisted
before the unwelcome molestation, the intrusive quickening, of life: as
Frank Sulloway puts it, Life must have first arisen [. . .] when inani-
mate matter became cathected by some external force, and an instinct
simultaneously came into being which sought to cancel out the tension
that had just been acquired.3 In this light, life can be read as an aber-
ration, a chance convulsion that, relative to the other planets, makes
Earth the exception, the only place in the universe where this unique
and unplanned disturbance of inanimate continuity occurred. Yes, from
Freuds speculations about a beyond of the pleasure-principle residing
in the death-drive, one could infer that his was a psychologistic version
of the nihilism so bruited in the first part of the twentieth century, but
no the death-drive stops short of annihilation. While it might acqui-
esce in the removal of presence by death, it restores an earlier state, and
might be better understood as retraction or retrenchment, an ultimate
status quo ante. Not that therefore it should be understood as innocu-
ous or benign: if the death aimed at by the death-drive replaces the
organic with the inorganic, and this speaks to a de minimis prevailing as

Introduction 9
opposed to nothingness, it doesnt mean the death-drive wasnt, as the

word suggests, a drive, a force that summoned itself in order to counter
something call it life that might have continued on terms of its own
and towards an ordinary death, one that hadnt been put in reverse, sent
back to an archaic origin. It drove against something, this death-drive,
and so a certain resistance or friction had to be involved, and with it a
hostility not so cleanly decoupled from destruction.
Its in this version of destruction, perhaps, that the driveness of the
drive, and its presenting superfluousness, consists. On the one hand,
theres the naked destructiveness that leaves behind it nothing, the
instincts of aggression run amok, and of this first kind of destructive-
ness, the death-drive partakes a little but only a little. After all, death
itself would have taken care of the end of life. On the other hand, the
death-drive embraces, sources itself from, a so-called destructiveness
whose mission its an almost aesthetic imperative seeks to preserve
a pure irreducibility, a minimum, a prior state and a priority that rests
on the near side of nothingness; and not least because, in this, the death-
drive will have preserved, retained or conserved n, this latter nothing
is something. It might have chosen, given its the death-drive, to leave
nothing behind, but the death-drive opts for withholding: it withholds
from destruction the last vestige of being inorganic being, to be sure
that it otherwise might have smashed into extinction. But in getting to
this zero point of care, of archival tenderness even, it had to clear a path,
to scythe away what was in the tendency of life merely to die; to get to
the last refuge of conservation, it had to add death to death, to bend
the terminus back to an origin, and its in this supplementary gesture
that its essence, or at least its function, resides. Although apparently
gratuitous, the death-drive thereby plays a role left vacant by death:
where death destroys, the drive preserves. True, what it seeks to preserve
is a leastness, a near-nothing, but that nevertheless has a value. Left to
itself, death would destroy everything. What the death-drive does is to
preserve, in the midst of death, a leastness, a less than being that is more
than nothing.
Of course it never succeeds, because death leaves it with nothing, but
the death-drive, as a drive, will have set its sights on this withheld, ante-
rior trace of an earlier life that had yet to come alive. A drive it may be,
but compared with death, the death-drive is weaker, because it has only
phylogenetic nostalgia to field against the constantly renewing resources
of death which unrelentingly put lives to an end, and with an irrevers-
ibility that is definitive. In this sense, when we die we continue to die
over time, the death-drive never having been able to turn the clock back,
to return our dead selves to the past. It is, after all, only a drive.

10 Death-Drive
The literature
Only a drive it may be, but the death-drive has stimulated intense reac-
tion and, without hoping to provide a full literature review, I would like,
for the sake of adding context, to pick out very briefly some of the more
striking works in the post-Freudian canon on death those, at least, that
do not simply repudiate Freuds hypothesis.
Ill start with Melanie Klein, whose published work remains through-
out much more closely tacked to the clinical experience of psychoanalysis
than Freuds often more expansive texts. And its just the destructiveness
in the death-drive that we were discussing a moment ago that perhaps
most interests Klein: she certainly has little to say about Freuds more
exotic theories of phylogenesis. Take Peter, the little boy whose analy-
sis she relates in The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique.4 Peter has a toy
man whom he throws from a brick thats a stand-in for a bed, and Klein
interprets this as Peters death-wish towards his father. Why would the
little boy wish his father dead? Because he had seen his father having sex
with his mother in the bed being represented, and it provoked a jealousy
in him that Peter could assuage only by staging his fathers death. At
another level, the toy represents Peter himself whom Peter wishes to
punish for having the sexual feelings towards his mother that made him
jealous. Its a story that says a lot about Kleinian theory its adapta-
tion of the Oedipus complex, its emphasis on objects and their symbolic
value but it also says that Kleins thoughts on death can be subsumed
under the psychological category of aggression. The death of the father
has little to do, at least at first sight, with the Freudian return to the
state of inertia, and much more resembles the primary sadism that, as
weve seen, Freud distinguishes from the death-drive. Having said that,
its a sadism on the boys part that brings some relief, plausibly causing
a reduction in unpleasure. In other words, sadism can be a source of
great pleasure, and might therefore offer itself to the death-drive as an
instrument.
But of course, the death-drive, insofar as it is a drive, and certainly
insofar as it is a principle, puts itself beyond treatment Jean Laplanche
goes so far as to say it is radically excluded from the field of the uncon-
scious,5 and for Freud, it joins pleasure in the very structuring of the
psyche, meaning that it cant in itself become an object for psycho-
analysis. Whereas Klein was indeed primarily a clinician, harvesting
psychoanalysis for the empirical dimension, and the story of Peter
belongs with a larger clinical endeavour that lay in helping patients
commute aggressive tendencies into more accepting ones, and that
meant construing the death-drive as death instincts that might be first

Introduction 11
observed and then converted into life instincts. In therapeutic terms, this
represented a shift from the paranoid to the depressive state: a patient
trapped in the paranoid state knows only polarised views bad father,
good mother, for example, as in the Peter story; the depressive patient,
by contrast, has learned to deal with ambiguity both father and mother
are both good and bad. Sound mental health lies in tolerating imper-
fection, and where theres an obsession with death with destruction,
aggression or sadism the problem is less its morbid character than
its representing the world as a series of stark choices which throws the
chooser into crisis. Its not that Klein downplays the significance of death
on the contrary, it forms a key axis along which behaviour moves but
that the death she refers to probably takes little from the metapsycho-
logical, even metaphysical, profile of the Freudian death-drive. Implicitly
shes suspicious of any benefit it might afford, except insofar as the
death instincts or, rather, the instincts for aggression can be con-
quered and civilised. If nothing else, the death instincts for Klein provide
an energy that, through treatment, can be moderated in the direction of
more depressive better socially adjusted behaviour.
What Klein also stresses less in the game that Peter plays is the func-
tion of repetition childrens games being highly ritualistic and yet, in
the development of the theory of psychoanalysis, it was to the problem
of repetition that the death-drive arrived as a solution. As well as noting
that the goal of pleasure looked indistinguishable from death, Freud was
puzzled by the question as to why, if the psyche is governed by pleasure,
it will repeat things that appear to cause it harm? As Richard Boothby
puts it in his study of Lacan (whom well come to in a moment), The
repetitive, even compulsively repetitive character of these phenomena
[traumatic dreams, restaging loss, masochism] led Freud to suspect the
operation of a fundamental instinctual force.6 The solution to the rep-
etition paradox was that in the repetition of trauma, the trauma counts
less than the repetition; and repetition brings consolation, whatever
content it repeats, because it keeps things the same, admitting none of
the variation that causes the psyche to flinch. Its on these grounds that
repetition is deathly: it practises a studied exclusion of difference, of any
disturbance of the wavelengths that track across the mind. Better, there-
fore, to repeat a trauma than undergo a new experience, even if that new
experience proffers pleasure.
Theres another, more famous, childrens game supposedly involving
death and repetition, which comes from Beyond the Pleasure Principle
itself, and which has set off a whole sub-canon of writing by Donald
Winnicott, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to name only a few. It
features another little boy Freuds own grandson, no less rolling away

12 Death-Drive
a kind of bobbin and reeling it back again, shouting Fort! when it goes
and Da! when it comes back. In his interpretation of the game, Freud
himself doesnt mention death, but he does talk about the boy deriving
pleasure from what, at first sight, looks like an unpleasurable symbolic
act, that is using the spool to represent the mothers departure.7 But,
of course, the sending-away is a necessary precursor to its return, and
its the return, along with the fact that the little boy actively controls
the movements, that results in pleasure. Jacqueline Rose says that [t]he
death drive is identified by Freud in that moment when the child seeks to
master absence by staging the recall of the lost object,8 which is a little
hasty as a reading, but the main point is there: by dramatising his moth-
ers absence, the little boy, as if overstepping his own littleness, controls
its unpleasant effects on him, converting them into pleasure; at the same
time, the repeating of the game not only repeats that pleasure but also
serves to ward off any new scenario with his mother that might trigger a
fresh, unforeseen instance of pain. Implicitly, the death-drive is at work.
Its only later on, after the discussion of the game, that Freud makes
the link between repetition and death explicit repetition serving to
keep psychic disturbance to a moribund minimum. However, the boys
game prepares the ground, which means that, apart from anything
else, Freud is using his discussion of it as a rhetorical move designed to
soften the reader up, so to speak, and its the texts rhetorical strategy,
as much as its content, that interests Derrida.9 In the to-and-fro of the
boys wooden spool, Derrida sees a correlative (or something closer) to
Freuds own havering in the argument a havering between proposing
and disavowing the theory of the death-drive and, with it, the more
general question of taking up a position on a subject, of stating a thesis
or adopting a position. Derridas project is to relier, to tie back, the
question of life death to the question of the position.10 In particular,
he alights on the trope for want of a better word of speculation, the
hypothetical character of Freuds thinking in the text. What is the link
with death? A Kleinian interpretation of the game might say the boy is
staging the death of his mother, by throwing her away, thus punishing
her for ever having left him. But from a Derridean view, that would be
simplistic. The sending-away, for Derrida, is not in itself a death, but
merely an absence or even a distant presence. To that extent, the risk
the boy takes in despatching the spool is limited hes not really letting
her go, and after all, theres string attached and so the speculation
he makes as to her return is fairly circumscribed and safe. The same
goes for Freuds argument: hes playing at a radical theory of the death-
drive, but is all the while keeping it tied to the string of psychoanalysis,
thus manipulating the positions like a puppeteer just as by positing a

Introduction 13
beyond of the pleasure principle Freud is actually keeping it in sight. In

a move analogous to his critique of the history of madness as narrated
by Foucault, whereby madness must by definition escape any history of
it, Derrida suggests that the death-drive cannot, in principle, submit to
becoming an object for psychoanalysis it always removes itself from
any place or position in which it might be stationed. Instead, Derrida,
who insists on a distinction between absence and death, suggests that
any death-drive worth its name must involve the possibility of never
coming back, of absolute loss, of losing its position, including Freud
letting go of his argument and, indeed, letting go of the whole edifice of
psychoanalysis over which not least by using his own grandson as a
purportedly objective test case he continues to preside.
In this reading, the death-drive does not belong psychologically to
this or that individual, as in Klein, nor might it be calibrated with a
phylogenetic urge on the part of the human species to return to a state
of inanimate inertia, as in Freud. Rather, it becomes the condition of all
sending-away and return, not just of toys, but of everything with com-
municative potential, with the power of signification, that we might put
out into the world. If the boys game represents anything, its the fact
that reason or logic is constantly pulled between two forces one that
allows it to be out there, to be read, understood, passed on and inter-
preted, and another, anterior to it, which allowed it to come into being
in the first place, that paradoxically marks its absolute disappearance.
The death-drive in Derrida becomes, among other things, that which
both enables and cancels out every game that can be played, and every
positive statement that can be made; the position is posited as posi-
tive or even a super-positive such as a beyond only insofar as its
positionality will have been undermined. Hence what Derrida calls an
aporia between the thesis of the death-drive, that is its intelligibility as a
concept or construct, and its force as a-thetic disappearance.
In the same book where his essay on Freud appears, Derrida takes
Lacan to task for a similar misprision, isolating in Lacan a redemptive
urge that prevents him from understanding death as absolute loss, as
the possibility of zero return on any speculative investment.11 There is
the implication again that death has been conveniently elided with (a
positive) absence, and its true that in his earlier works Lacan appears
to think of the death-drive in a psychologistic fashion not wholly dis-
similar to Klein whom he occasionally cites: death gets associated with
the childs loss of intimacy with the mothers body, and the death-drive
signals a nostalgic desire to return to it. Similarly, when Lacan writes
about the instincts of aggression, death often connotes the fragmen-
tation of the self that aggression can lead to for both perpetrator and
SMITH TEXT (M2033).indd 13SMITH TEXT (M2033).indd 13 6/1/10 10:39:056/1/10 10

14 Death-Drive
victim, a fragmentation that prompts the compensatory reaction to

reintegrate the parts. In the words of Richard Boothby again: For
Lacan, the traumatic force of the death drive aims not at the biological
organism but at the unity of the ego.12
But Lacans work is not simply derivative and if, famously, he says
in the crits that to ignore the death instincts in Freuds doctrine is to
misunderstand that doctrine entirely,13 its not solely in the spirit of dis-
ciple and protector that hes writing. In his own analysis of the Fort-Da
game, Lacan introduces a new term, desire, whose relationship to the
death-drive is one whereby it both incorporates and supersedes the
death-drives elements. He says that:
The subject is not simply mastering his privation by assuming it, but . . . is
raising his desire to a second power. For his action destroys the object that it
causes to appear and disappear in the anticipating provocation of its absence
and its presence. His action thus negatives the field of forces of desire in order
to become its own object to itself. And this object, being immediately embod-
ied in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations, announces in the
subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of the phonemes, whose
synchronic structure existing language offers to his assimilation; moreover,
the child begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of
the environment, by reproducing more or less approximately in his Fort! and
in his Da! the vocables that he receives from it.14
Its hardly a clear account, but Lacan seems to be saying that any death-
liness in the game can be read as a negative phase en route to a conclu-
sion, somewhat as in Hegelian dialectics, and the desire to do away with
the toy, to destroy it, leads on to a place where the whole scene takes
on new meaning for the boy. The desire, which was once caught up
in deathly and aggressive feelings, opens out into language which has
the ability to bring words together in this case the two exclamations,
Fort! and Da! in time, thus realising a reintegration at a higher level
of desire, the reintegration formerly threatened by the deathly or aggres-
sive instincts. Which is to say the words spoken are as important as the
toy, for its these that have the power to stage a symbolic cohesion that
the game alone falls short of. This linguistic gain doesnt quite restore
the loss that occurred in reality before the game was played, and desire
doesnt quite substitute for a sense of identity, but nevertheless it will
have overcome more deathly and fissiparous possibilities. And so if,
for Freud, the pleasure that steers the death-drive results in, as it were,
a downward gesture, one of return to the ultra-simple, then in Lacan,
almost the reverse applies: pleasure gets substituted by desire, and
desire, even if first it has to pass through destruction, will work upwards,
so to speak, towards integration and complexity, and for a relationship

Introduction 15
to the world that, far from being reticent and inward, is linguistic, that
is a mode of attachment and social connection.
Just as well: if the death-drive were not sublated or sublimated in the
manner described by Lacan, then social connection would come under
severe pressure. Freud was clearly aware of this, and in both Why War?
and Civilisation and Its Discontents, he effectively launched a new dis-
cipline of psychoanalytic sociology that would hold the death-drive near
its centre, but as the force necessary for civilisation to resist. He writes,
for example, that:
Mans natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all
against each, opposes this programme of civilisation. This aggressive instinct
is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we
have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And
now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilisation is no longer obscure
to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the
instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the
human species.15
As well as the helpful clarification that the aggressive instinct is, rather
than a synonym for it, a derivative of the death instinct, Freud makes it
clear that civilisation itself acquires meaning only with reference to those
aggressive instincts that would seek to destroy it. Indeed, civilisation is the
outcome of the struggle between life and death, and, for the generation
writing after Second World War, Freuds work provided valuable tools
for processing the events of world history. In short, wartime had testified
to a global upsurge in the death instincts, a violation done unto civilisa-
tion, which it was the mission of postwar civilisation to salve and reverse.
Far from residing as a mere speculative hypothesis at the outer limits of
metapsychology, the death-drive had been mobilised like an armoured
tank that came to sit menacingly at the centre of European history.
For a critic such as Norman O. Brown the implication is that such
history is generated by the very conflict between the life and death
instincts. The tragedy is that the root cause lies not in abstract histori-
cal forces, as in Hegel, say, but in the human beings aggressive instinct
and the extroversion of it that would otherwise be turned inward the
implication being that civilisation cannot come about without destruc-
tion, or, putting it in sensationalist terms, theres no art without war,
and without war thered be more suicide. In his 1959 publication, Life
Against Death, Brown argues that:
According to Freud, aggressiveness represents a fusion of the life instinct with

the death instinct, a fusion which saves the organism from the innate
self-destructive tendency of the death instinct by extroverting it, a desire to

16 Death-Drive
kill replacing the desire to die. As against Freud, we suggest that this extro-
version of the death instinct is the peculiar human solution to a peculiar
human problem. It is the flight from death that leaves mankind with the
problem of what to do with its own innate biological dying, what to do with
its own repressed death. Animals let death be a part of life, and use the death
instinct to die: man aggressively builds immortal cultures and makes history
in order to fight death.16
As it happens, Browns gloss points at an alternative answer to the ques-

tion I began with, of the apparent superfluousness of the death-drive.
Where animals use the death instinct to die, man has been endowed
with a surplus of death, as it were, which wont be entirely used up by
his mortality. The residue belongs to man as the force of destruction
that, to all intents and purposes, merges with the force of creation. In
this sense, human life sits on a knife-edge in which it is almost arbitrary
whether peace or war eventuates. Clearly, peace and civilisation are
preferable to death and destruction, but cannot be guaranteed.
Not, at least, without repression: destruction needs converting into
creation, death into life, or else it simply destroys, and that means
repressing it. Certainly, Brown thinks of repression as the distinctive
human attribute and the source of self-salvation. But theres an alterna-
tive view, developed by Herbert Marcuse, which eschews this need for
repression, and not just on pragmatic grounds, but in principle. In his
most famous work, Eros and Civilisation, Marcuse poses the following
questions:
[I]s the conflict between pleasure principle and reality principle irreconcilable
to such a degree that it necessitates the repressive transformation of mans
instinctual structure? Or does it allow the concept of a non-repressive civilisa-
tion, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally
different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different
existential relations?17
So there is a slippage from death to reality. Where Freud, as we have

seen, comes in his later works to see death as its main rival, Marcuse
reinstates the reality principle as the primary opponent to life, and he
does so by positioning reality as the mechanism of repression. In other
words, Marcuse recasts the reality principle so that it resembles the
superego, that is the imperative placed on us by social life to find alterna-
tive, mediated outlets for the fulfilling of our wishes. One can take issue
with this recasting Laplanche and Pontalis, for example, say that the
transition from the pleasure to the reality principle does not, however,
involve the suppression of the pleasure principle.18 But that would be
to miss the wider political point Marcuse wishes to make. For his thesis

Introduction 17
is not just Freudian, but Marxist, and as his questions imply, the func-
tion of the reality principle might be more than social, if social just
means something normative: instead, it might be ideological. In this
sense eros becomes more than the individuals reserve of libido, and
rather the potential for collective dissidence, resistance to hegemony and
even revolution; somewhat as in Adornos argument with Freud, eros
or pleasure in Adorno when understood properly, has the potential,
therefore, not simply to generate civilisation, but generate alternative
cultures in which repression, as the residue of political authoritarianism,
would have very little part to play.19
As well as Adorno, one might, in this context, invoke Michel Foucault
for whom pleasure and eros relabelled as sexuality also harbour the
power of critique, if not active insurrection. By the time we get to his
later thinking, sexuality, particularly in its homoerotic form, is worn as
an aesthetic of the self that could plausibly be understood as deathly on
the grounds of its extremism literally a gay abandon to which life may
be sacrificed. But even Foucaults three-volume History of Sexuality has
notably little to say on the connection between sexuality and the death-
drive. Perhaps his most direct statement goes as follows:
The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deploy-
ment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex
itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It is in
this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct.
When a long while ago the West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value
high enough to make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this
equivalence, the highest of all. And while the deployment of sexuality permits
the techniques of power to invest life, the fictitious point of sex, itself marked
by that deployment, exerts enough charm on everyone for them to accept
hearing the grumble of death within it.20
Foucault claims to be relating a history in which sex has come to replace

love as the most precious thing for which one might, like Faust, sell ones
soul. In this sense, sex and death are equivalents better to have had sex
and lost ones life than never to have had sex at all which makes the
death instinct an instinct for sex itself. Except that theres enough irony
in the tone and enough argument in the rest of his work to infer that
sex itself may be an illusion and that the Ding an Sich of sex may itself
be the object of ideological projection with a repressive function of
its own. Which in no way implies that death would be illusory too: the
disturbing threat behind what Foucault writes is that sex leads to death
without providing the gratification of sex itself.
Thats particularly unsettling given the hackneyed romantic associa-
tions between sex and death the erotic charge of morbidity, the dark

18 Death-Drive
embrace of the deathly stranger especially as it hints at the possibility

of the death-drive working, as it were, autonomously, without neces-
sarily being indexed against sex, desire or pleasure.21 But the idea of a
death removed from sex or at least from sexual affect or pleasure is
a route few have pursued, although from Derridas work on cruelty,
which I discuss in Chapter 4 titled White Over Red and where
Derridas hypothesis, borrowed from Freud, that the death-drive works
in silence, colours everything one could derive a death-drive which,
again, concerns an irrecuperable loss, one with very little of the narcis-
sistic yield that often accompanies sexuality. Again one must distinguish
this from nihilism, for its very withdrawal, its depriving presence of
presence, is what permits all things to come to pass: all being is haunted.
This is the death-drive as the haunting of life, or to use a Derridean
neologism, a hauntology to shake the ontology with which death, as in
Heidegger, gets paired.
Hence Freudian hauntings in literature and art. In a moment Ill
describe how I think the artwork, literary or pictorial or otherwise, avails
itself of a death-drive, but its worth concluding this all-too-peremptory
review by suggesting that the death-drive, rather than belonging to any
overarching schema of western culture or psychoanalysis or philosophy,
enjoys a strength that comes from its weakness that fact that its barely
there, that it never appears as such at all. For Derrida wants to say that
the death-drive works in silence, and other thinkers, like Laplanche, like
to talk about its interior quality the shocking idea revealed by Freud
that the death-drive counts among our most inner, most archaic and nec-
essary compulsions and yet, to say it again, one ought not to take all
this as an opportunity to bring out a nihilism. If the death-drive enjoys a
presence-that-isnt-one, if it fails to register phenomenologically, and if
it doesnt protend itself as symptom and all this in the face of the pos-
sibility that in warfare the death-drive exhibits itself on the most colos-
sal scale its not to argue that the death-drive is simply nothing, just
as, on account of its conservative character, it doesnt simply annihilate
everything it takes into its purview. In the phrase of Simon Critchley, its
very little . . . almost nothing.22
The closest one gets in Freuds own texts to any hauntology would
be his work on the uncanny, developed more or less in tandem with
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and subsequently analysed so expertly
by Nicholas Royle.23 Common to both Freud essays is the theme of
repetition, but where in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the human com-
pulsion to repeat signals a longing for deathly sameness, The Uncanny
describes the uncanny sensation provoked in humans by things that are
repeated, especially where they become mechanical or robotic (think

Introduction 19
of toys taking on a life of their own, not just being manipulated by

children). Things come back, repeat or return in an unnatural way that
runs against the spontaneity one associates with life, and Freud refers
to Schellings notion of the reappearance of what should have remained
hidden.24 In Freudian doctrine, the uncanny heralds the return of the
repressed, which might be nothing less than the dead coming back to
life. Freud even wonders if death is not a merely biological construct,
and whether it might one day be overcome as a perhaps avoidable
event in life25 an interesting conjecture not least because it suggests
again Freuds reluctance to accept that death might open out into
absolutely nothing. Like the mind, from which, according to Freud, no
experience ever gets erased and so could always be reactivated life
can never be brought to an irreversible end. And its power of return,
in whatever form, would be uncanny, not just because of its affective
power, but because it would show how death has a certain life in it;
one could even cite Freuds thoughts in his paper on transience, about
the destruction caused by winter before spring returns the beauty of
nature to us . . .26 In his theory of death, Freud doesnt go this far, but
there might be a beyond of the beyond of the pleasure principle, defined
as the deathly instinct to return to the inanimate state in order to come
back again as living, where living and dying constitute not opposites
but different degrees of energy. Put more simply, the death-drive is the
instinct to come back to life, not to die, but to haunt. Which suggests
that life itself, rather than being fully alive, is already a form of energetic
haunting.
The death-drive could therefore be a differential energy, a haunting
not-thereness within life, which, having returned, seeks only to go back
once more to the state of nothingness. Life and death work together in
this haunted, energetic loop in which each seeks to minimise the other,
and, despite the rhetoric, there is no metaphysics outside of this play of
the inorganic versus the organic. Which takes us back to the organic
constraints on life, to biology, that element in Freuds thinking on death
which has probably elicited the most scepticism (Lacan says dismiss-
ively of the death-drive and repetition that we all know very well that
its not a question of biology).27 Frank Sulloway makes the plea that
Freuds notion of a death instinct, by virtue of its consistently misun-
derstood status in psychoanalytic theory, exemplifies just how fully his
intellectual union of psychology with biology has gone unappreciated
in psychoanalysis.28 Which is not to reinstate a biological materialism
against the metaphysical idealism, but it is to fight against the conceptual
architecture of life and death that would separate them out too much, to
taxonomise and tabulate them. Somewhat like a virus or a parasite, the

20 Death-Drive
death-drive lives within the body of life, trying to create stillness within
it, to put borders around it through which no disturbance can pass. And
its in this holding phenomenal and organic reality at bay, in this vain
attempt to put secure boundaries around itself, in this essay at a stasis
that will have passed through life and have experienced the colours and
vicissitudes of animate living, that an aesthetics of the death-drive begins
to emerge.
The death-drive and the aesthetic
Without a death-drive, would we forget to die? No, that we die is simply

the case, and the death-drive, as an instinct rather than a condition of
possibility, shouldnt be confused with mortality; for all its force, a drive
or instinct is always vulnerable to being stopped. From this angle, the
death-drive becomes an albeit ineffective resistance to death, in the name
of saving a certain quality or value of nothing that itself will have been
spared from the disturbances and energies of organic life. It has a pathos
to it. And if I used the word aesthetic above, its because it begins to
get at this pseudo-nothingness, at this inanimate, left-alone sufficiency
of life before life, and the longed-for sheltering of it by the death-drive.
Its in its urge for keeping intact, and in an inanimate state, that which
will have been exposed to the organic world, to life, that the death-drive
might start to be considered an aesthetic drive. In the face of destruction,
of inevitable transience and perdition of death the drive will have
directed itself at retaining something not subject to entropy, at tarrying
on the edge of creation. This instinct to take life and freeze it, so to
speak, in a more primary state, to keep it there, to effect some arrest,
might be an aesthetic one, in the sense that any aesthetic drive would
wish to posit an inorganic entity an artwork, not to beat about the
bush that, in the name of being created, takes on a different, a resistant
relationship to death and the destructiveness by which it operates.
Theres a second set of reasons for reframing the death-drive as
aesthetic, and its to do with the gratuitousness I have been insisting
on. Although the drive is a drive, which might suggest it enjoys some
necessity, it becomes a drive that is, it avails itself of force or will only
because, had it remained inactive, nothing else would have adopted
its mission. The default position for life is merely to die, and die into
the future without any return to an inorganic state yes, in dying,
the animate becomes inanimate, but its only by way of metaphor
that this process may be described as retrograde. The death-drive, in
other words, was never a necessity, never a destiny it was forced to

Introduction 21
reinforce itself, and thereby became excessive: the death-drive exceeds

death. However, there is in this some ambiguity if Freud uses the term
drive, it might well bear some affinity with the wish, with the urge
towards an end-state that cant be written off as supplementary. After
all, psychoanalysis rests on the doctrine that the wish conditions all
psychic activity; from a philosophical perspective, its refrain would be
that wishing has a relationship to being in which, far from being inferior
or auxiliary, it dominates. In psychoanalysis, pleasure is more important
than being, more important than life itself wed rather die than experi-
ence unpleasure. Insofar as the drive of the death-drive corresponds
to wishing, construing it as unnecessary cant therefore be entirely
uncontentious the death-drive could be understood as a species wish,
as inalienable from the human race as the individuals wish from the
individual . . . So, on the one hand, the death-drive is gratuitous, but
on the other hand, as a modality of wishing, of pleasure, of longing for
the satisfaction of stasis, it is as essential to the species as wish-fulfilment
to the individual. That makes the death-drive a form of unnecessary
pleasure a definition which again satisfies perhaps the demand for it
to be considered aesthetic except that pleasure, in this case, cant be
deemed a luxury, an aesthetic extra. In poststructuralist language, one
might call these contradictory requirements an aporia, the marriage of
irreconcilable conditions, or a necessary impossibility. The death-drive
both is and isnt necessary, which, given that, like the aesthetic, its
interest lies in pleasure, redefines pleasure in turn as both dispensable
and indispensable and raises the question of whether aesthetic pleasure
itself can always be dismissed as solely inessential.
In the name of pleasure, the death-drive tries to preserve, then, and
in the midst of death, a trace of life both after it has died and before it
has lived, and it is this pleasurable quasi-nothingness from which life,
creation, will have been generated. Pleasure becomes the alpha and
omega, a lying on either side of the animate, coming before or after the
animate, which life separates out. To the extent that pleasure and the
aesthetic may be associated the aesthetic having long been understood
as a chief form of pleasure, even if its not so explicit in Freud that
means the aesthetic might be counted among the vast tautology men-
tioned before. If life pursues pleasure and pleasure pursues death, then
the pleasurableness of death which is, qua pleasure, aesthetic means
the aesthetic holds its place with Eros and Thanatos. Put more simply:
artworks deliver pleasure, and pleasure is death, a transport towards the
pleasurable or beautiful inanimate.
In sum, its for three reasons that we might want to say the death-
drive has something of the aesthetic: it produces the inanimate; it is

22 Death-Drive
gratuitous, albeit with a gratuitousness that is necessary; and it con-

stitutes a form of pleasure. The death-drive and the aesthetic share an
interest in reproducing, without being asked, something pleasurable and
inanimate that, in retreating from life, bears its trace.
But is this not simply to say the relationship between the death-drive
and the aesthetic is one of mere resemblance? And if the death-drive
is aesthetic, does the reverse apply? Does it automatically mean that
the aesthetic takes on the qualities of the death-drive? Typically, Freud
himself interprets the artwork as he interprets the dream as the con-
densed, displaced representation of its authors wishes; and although
those wishes must, as pleasure-seeking, enjoy a link with the death-
drive, nowhere explicitly does Freud connect the two. Indeed, as his
theories mature, he tends to see artworks as feats of civilisation, tokens
of human triumph over barbarism, which arguably relocates them from
id to superego that is, they are the successful sublimations into civilised
or cultural form of largely unwholesome, sexual longings. That makes
repression the shipping into the id of those longings the spring of cre-
ativity, and even if the artworks thus created are, having been created,
strictly speaking inanimate or dead even if they produce in their con-
sumer an absence of unpleasure they are still to be treated as works
of enlightenment and, one might say, enlivenment. Precious artifacts of
civilised expression, artworks, if its not fatuous to say so, belong with
life: an avid collector of cultural artifacts, Freud appeared, for example,
to respect them for their unique documentary worth, their ability, in
other words, to testify to noble efforts at acculturation. After all, art-
works are not organic, and cannot be affected (they dont feel anything)
by the pathos of return to near-nothing which the death-drive drives
through the human species. It would be a bizarre anthropomorphism
indeed to claim that artworks want to die. So if there is a death-drive of
the artwork, it needs careful defining.
Now, its entirely possible, on the Freudian view, that the pleasure
afforded by an artwork might reward its consumer with a sense of calm-
ness, a relief from excitation no different from that delivered by other
pleasures. Both the death-drive and art provide means towards a pleas-
urable end, which would be that of inertia, the absence of unpleasure,
if not quite of death. In this sense, one might use art as a local form of
the death-drive, a means of extracting pleasure that will lead to the still-
ing of agitation. And one could, conceivably, leave the argument there.
Its probably in the chapters ahead that deal most with rhetoric and
imagination that the point is the more rigorously made, but, beyond that
Freudian argument, its a question of the preoccupation with the near-
nothingness of artworks, that matters their capacity not, as it happens,

Introduction 23
to reflect or represent reality, but rather to deplete and alter it thereby,

perhaps, doing the opposite, that is enhancing and concentrating it. For
if among the most classic and classical definitions of artworks stands
that which construes them as mimetic, as reproductions of a real truth,
as technical, artistic or skilful copies of nature, then my argument is
nothing if not post-classical. For in this supposed representation, some-
thing more than the original presence gets lost and in a process not dis-
similar from Freudian oneirology or dreamwork something akin, that
is, to condensation and displacement.
Take displacement. Freud says artworks dont so much reflect reality
as distort it; whats more, the reality at stake is not the empirical world
as susceptible to consensual description, but the experience experienced
by an individual and ingested in his or her psyche. Nevertheless Freud
assumes even if subsequently it gets censored, edited or corrupted an
original presence, an experience at some prior point real and true for
the person involved. Any displacement is a displacement of something.
The later-vitiated origin of the artifact, psychic or aesthetic, is both
posited and respected as such; the original experience might get irrecov-
erably transfigured, but an original experience there incontestably was.
Now, Im not against this idea of an original experience that an artist
turns into art on the contrary, its fundamental. That said, one might
hope, as Freud sometimes suggests, to argue that the given original
experience might never have actually happened, but be a retrospective
fantasy. Instead of assuming that there was an original experience, one
might, again in poststructuralist language, argue instead that there will
have been an original experience, some purportedly primary sensory or
psychological data that was, in fact, a posteriori from the outset. Either
way, the Freudian artwork amounts to the redaction of something, real
or imaginary, that preceded it. That implies that no artwork is, despite
the popular view, creative; having always been preceded by the event
which formed its resource, it cant claim to be original or originary
unless the originality of the artwork lies precisely in the refiguring of that
resource, in which case what the artwork originates is a working-over
of its own origin. Effectively, thats where the Freudian argument stops,
and where a different possibility takes over. For to claim the origin of
the artwork lies wholly within the experience of its creator is to fall
short of a fuller explanation and one could, at this point, turn towards
Heidegger, who campaigned for the origin of the artwork lying in a
fundamental ontology, in the wellspring of Being that has a relationship
of its own, as youd expect, with death. But thats not the turn I want to
make: instead I would like to elaborate the possibility that the origin of
the artwork did not, in order for that artwork to come about, have to

24 Death-Drive
exist as such. In Freudian terms, it could have been imagined or invented

by the artist. But what if one went further, and said the artwork depends
on a radical emptiness, an absence that, in a moment, Ill recalibrate
with the death-drive. For artworks, qua artworks, can get away without
positing reality of any kind or, if not not positing, then without assum-
ing the positing and positioning of whats real. What, if not art, is free
to free itself from the constraints of reality? And is that freedom not
definitive? Insofar as art makes sense as a category, it would have to be
exempted from respecting reality, even to the point of excising reality
from its very origin. Where else can one go for the non-real?
Its in this non-reality that the death-drive of art might operate, where
non-reality means not unreal as in fantastical or crazy but not posited
as such or not claiming status. Perhaps irreal is the better term. I am
describing something that is there, like a painting, without being there.
Yes, the painting exists as an object, a canvas, a frame, a smear of paint,
but as an artwork it can repudiate reality and being. And if painting is
too obvious a choice, it can apply to songs or poems or even buildings.
Its the freedom to exist without reference to existence, to pass without
an indication of being, that might define the artwork and ally it with
the death-drive. Its not death, if death is nothingness, but a variety of
being without reality retaining a relationship to what is, but inor-
ganic and, in principle, free from what is. This means that whats crea-
tive about the artwork is its lifting-away from needing to posit, from
having to be positive, its licence never to deal with the real. The artwork
neednt set anything down, neednt commit to an assertion or statement,
and, without compromising itself in any way, may remain suspended
from reality. Its almost by definition a creative space, therefore, that
it occupies or a sphere of freedom. Free from what is, from the real,
from being and from the posited, the artwork which nevertheless
takes physical form as inanimate phenomena, be they in the spatial or
temporal arts refrains from contributing to the world of things.
I would argue that this constitutive power to hold being and reality at
bay, to pass beyond or behind whats real or present, to slough off the
world as the presentation of phenomena, means the death-drive works
as the silent motor of the artwork. As it were the spirit of the artwork,
the death-drive carries the artwork away from all that is, from all that
is there, and in so doing protects it as an artwork. Any representa-
tions of life that the artwork bears in the realist novel, say will come
second, after this constitutive energy in the artwork, its death-drive,
to find itself in what is not real, present, posited or given. Rather than
seeing the artwork according to the Platonic schema, as a copy of a
copy, we might say the artwork begins precisely in a turning-away from

Introduction 25
phenomena, in the right to digress from what is. Not that its turn away
from the real becomes, in a counter-Platonic move, a turn towards the
ideal. Even where its subject-matter is reality a painting of a harbour
its aesthetic status derives from the latitude it has to have no concern
with realities, and stop there; and so, when we look at the painting,
were seeing an essentially unreal portrayal of real things, but in a non-
Platonic sense. The artwork looks at the world in such a way that, even
as it begins to reflect it, it will have already repudiated what it sees,
will have already implicitly known it could have got along without it.
The content or the subject-matter remain the content or the subject-
matter, but qua artwork the artwork will treat them only as pragmatic
resources, as material that could be substituted for other material, and
that remains exterior to the artwork which always reserves the ability
to reject it.
Im not saying merely that all artworks are fictive or imaginary, but
that the privilege they enjoy, and which defines them, of not being
bound by anything that is, by what is given, means they are irreducibly
organised by a death-drive, an adherence or loyalty to a state of impas-
sive disengagement with anything beyond themselves. In an important
sense, artworks are not of this world. It is, if you like, the principle of
art to exonerate itself from worldly concerns; its condition of possibil-
ity is that it rejects all that is, even if subsequently it comes to host, as it
were, worldly material.
The reader might hear in this allusions to art for arts sake, but the
privilege I refer to is not in that sense aesthetic, not about an ideal. The
opening gesture of the artwork, before it exists, will have been to destroy
for its own purposes the phenomenal world it finds itself in. In schematic
terms, if there were a world of the real, and a world of the ideal, then
we might introduce the possibility of a third dimension, inhabited by the
death-drive and the aesthetic, and this is the co-existence, within life,
of what seeks to nullify it, of what operates by what might be called a
radical asceticism. As this death-in-life, the artwork turns away from
everything that is, thus creating a space not of the actual, but of the
possible, the imaginary, the unreal, the rhetorical and the suggestive.
Notes
1. Insofar as masochism constitutes an injury perpetrated by the self upon the
self, and might involve some albeit perverse pleasure, then masochism can
always be seen as the thin end of the wedge, and no less distinguished a
critic than Jean Laplanche orients his great work on life and death in psy-
choanalysis from this point of view. See Jean Laplanche, Vie et Mort en

26 Death-Drive
Psychanalyse, suivi de Drivation des Entits Psychanalytiques (Paris:

Flammarion, 1970).
2. The suspicion with which Freuds text has been treated continues to this
day. Perhaps the most hot-headed version of it in recent years is that of
Todd Dufresne in his Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in
Text and Context (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), which
talks spitefully of gullible patients and academics (p. 184).
3. Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic
Legend (London: Burnett Books, in association with Andr Deutsch, 1979),
p. 402.
4. The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1986), pp. 467.
5. Jean Laplanche, Vie et Mort en Psychanalyse, suivi de Drivation des
Entits Psychanalytiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), p. 13. My
translation.
6. Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacans
Return to Freud (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 104.
7. SE, XVIII, pp. 1417.
8. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to
Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 112.
9. Jacques Derrida, To Speculate on Freud, in The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 257410. Its also worth noting
that many people now quote Freuds statement that the aim of all life is
death as if it were straight to camera, so to speak, while forgetting to add
the italics Freud used and the number of conditionals he applied. What he
actually wrote was: If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception
that everything living dies for internal reasons becomes inorganic once
again then we shall be compelled to say that the aim of all life is death
and, looking backwards, that inanimate things existed before living ones
(SE, XVIII, p. 38).
10. Ibid., p. 259.
11. Ibid., pp. 41196.
12. Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacans
Return to Freud (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 71.
13. Quoted by Richard Boothby in ibid., p. 10.
14. Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge,
1977), p. 103.
15. SE, XXI, p. 122.
16. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of
History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 101.
17. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (London: Allen Lane/Penguin
Press, 1969), p. 24.
18. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, with an
Introduction by Daniel Lagache, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:
Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1988), p. 380.
19. An analogous claim is made by Lee Edelman, who interprets this surplus
as a value of queerness: The drive more exactly, the death drive holds
a privileged place in this book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien

Introduction 27
and internal to the logic of the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that
dismantles the subject from within, the death drive names what the queer,
in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to
every form of social viability. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and
the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004),
p. 9.
20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 156.
21. Its especially worth being aware of this given the account by Jonathan
Dollimore, say, in his ambitious book on death in western culture, whose
opening pages rather too easily appropriate Foucaults work in order to
associate sexuality and death: Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss
in Western Literature (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1998).
22. I refer to the title of Simon Critchleys Very Little . . . Almost Nothing:
Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997).
23. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). See in particular
Royles chapter on the death-drive (pp. 84106).
24. SE, XVII, p. 241.
25. Ibid., p. 242.
26. SE, XIV, p. 305.
27. Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge,
1977), p. 102.
28. Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic
Legend (London: Burnett Books, in association with Andr Deutsch, 1979),
p. 395.

Chapter 1
Memento Mori
Philosopher, cest apprendre mourir. (Montaigne)
Being we have no idea of it other than living. How can anything dead
be? (Nietzsche)
What, then, is it to cross the ultimate border? . . . Is it possible? Who has ever
done it and who can testify to it? (Derrida)
Once is never this phrase, according to Peter Szondi, encapsulates

the golden rule of science and all verifiable knowledge in general. What
occurs only once poses something intolerable and indeed impossible
for scientific thinking: it cannot be verified and so escapes the order of
knowledge as the ground of certainty. How can we be certain of what
happens only once? Einmal ist keinmal scientific thinking views the
particular only as a specimen, a species implicitly or explicitly belong-
ing to a genus. Knowledge is derived by inference from specific cases in
respect of a general order. In the essay from 1962 entitled On Textual
Understanding it is literary criticism which Szondi charges with too
readily embracing this scientific code of practice when on the contrary
it should pause to consider the extreme possibility raised by the way in
which tropes work in literary texts, that of existing at random and in
relation to no other figural or literal moment, eluding verifiability and
thus breaching scientific decorum.1 I will come back to this but mainly
I want to follow a different set of implications provoked by Szondis
insight into sciences repression of the singular, its sidelining or denial
of it. They concern our knowledge about death. Paul de Man in a later
essay (1979) perhaps influenced by Szondi develops this notion of the
absolute contingency of the literary trope and associates it with what
he thinks of as the random power of death.2 I read this random power
of death, its absolute contingency, its sheer unrelatedness and saturated
specificity, in terms of the requirement that it happen to us only once.

30 Death-Drive
Death can be experienced only once by definition for death is the death
of experience berhaupt. Superficially one might ask, what could be
more particular, more real and thus more choice for a scientific mate-
rialism than an event so specific that it happens just once and which
therefore cannot in principle belong to an idealising, totalising scheme
of history? Its particularity could not be gainsaid and no idealist his-
toricism could assimilate it. At the same time, however, such an oppor-
tunity brings on a crisis for scientific materialism which thereby reaches
its own limit, for it finds an object, an event so specific or singular that
it may be unthinkable, no apparatus may comprehend it, and thus an
aporia between materialism and the scientific credibility it aspires to is
lit up. This singularity of death, its particularity and one-offness, con-
stitutes one of at least two essential characteristics, the other being that
insisted on by Heidegger, namely that no one can die my death in my
place it is unavoidable which would be a second form of deaths
uniqueness. Death, Heidegger writes, is Daseins ownmost possibil-
ity.3 This is not to be confused with cases of sacrifice in which someone
dies for another. The phrase to die for another misleads us for the
sacrificial victim will still die his or her own death in dying for another,
and only metaphorically or by elision can they be said to die someone
elses death. I shall examine such specificity. The question that emerges
is: If Death happens to us only once how can we have any knowledge
of it? Can the golden rule be applied here? Surely science wouldnt say
that because death can be experienced only once that it therefore never
happens? What does it mean for something to have to happen only once
both to have to happen only once and to have to happen only once
to be intrinsically unrepeatable, and what are the consequences for
our knowledge about it? What follows is a brief inquiry into the status
of our knowledge about death in the light not only of this onceness
and specificity but also of other aspects, for example whether death can
be known as certain or if not as certain then as fictional, rhetorical or
speculative; whether we can be absolutely certain of it and yet forget it;
and how it conditions human experience. In short, how can we think
death?
Three responses to Pascal
I would like to begin with two excerpts from a letter of Pascal:4
You do not need a greatly elevated soul to realise that in this life there is no
true and firm satisfaction, that all our pleasures are simple vanity, that our

Memento Mori 31
afflictions are infinite, and lastly that death, which threatens us at every
moment, must in a few years infallibly present us with the appalling necessity
of being either annihilated or wretched for all eternity.
And a few paragraphs later:
Nothing is so important to man as his condition. Nothing is so frightening to

him as eternity. And so the fact that there are men indifferent to the loss of
their being and to the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is not natural. They
are quite different with regard to everything else: they fear even the most
insignificant things, they foresee them, feel them, and the same man who
spends so many days and nights in rage and despair over the loss of some
office or over some imaginary affront to his honour is the very one who,
without anxiety or emotion, knows he is going to lose everything through
death. It is a monstrous thing to see in the same heart and at the same time
both this sensitivity to the slightest things, and this strange insensitivity to the
greatest.
It is monstrous, in Pascals eyes, to be so negligent of the fact of death,

our condition. In order to contemplate and respond to his righteous
indignation we need to make a distinction between forgetting death
and forgetting about the fact that we are going to die. Clearly Pascal
has his mind on this second form. After all one will never be able to
remember ones own death. That is something that death brings, an
end to memory, the impossibility of remembering anything ever again
including the death which imposed the impossibility. Rilke in the first
of the Duino Elegies says that in death you lose even your own first
name.5 Death cannot be remembered. Rather, one remembers or ought
to remember that one will die. One is called to a that, a direction or
attribute; a grammar routes the thought, adjusting it toward a deter-
minate content, that one will die. However, this determinate content
turns out to be empty. Because it happens only once we cannot know
what this that points towards in saying that we will die. In this regard
the thought is meaningless. This determinate and absolutely certain
thought that we will die subsists undetermined. The thought of death
presents itself as thoroughly unique in this regard. No other thought in
the world manages absolute certainty and complete indeterminacy at
the same time. The price paid for abundant certainty is lack of content.
I am certain of something I absolutely do not know. Only the that of
death can ever be invoked and precisely because death occurs only once
and precludes any subsequent reflection on it; death precludes all sub-
sequence, or more succinctly still, death precludes. We are a sign, as
Hlderlin says, meaningless. There is a sense but there is no meaning;
there is direction but no horizon.

32 Death-Drive
And yet, given its certainty, how is it possible to ignore or even forget
about death? If Pascal prickles at the indifference of those who do not
ruminate upon it, there must be a prior possibility that death can indeed
be forgotten. The stately fact of death in all its gravity and relevance for
the human condition may be set aside, overlooked or, whats worse for
Pascal, relegated in favour of more immediate worldly concerns.
Is it not strange to have to remember that one must die? That one
has to be reminded of this, the most crucial and determining condition
of ones existence? For insofar as death can be forgotten it forfeits its
pre-eminence as a fact; in its forgettability it stands on a par with all else
that may be forgotten; I can forget about death just as I might forget my
umbrella. It could well be proved an epistemological or psychological
law that nothing exists which cannot in principle be forgotten, but the
forgettability of death is that not a scandal of some sort? Ought that
not to be a special case when it comes to remembering and forgetting?
Isnt there something hubristic or at least irreverent in forgetting about
death, some failure to salute an absolute authority? Is it not simply too
important to forget even for a moment? St Paul writes in his letter to the
Thessalonians of the requirement to pray without ceasing: isnt some-
thing equal to that required for the thought of death? Socrates in the
Phaedo (80c 81) even speaks of the soul as that which emerges through
meditation on death. The soul comes into its own through a separa-
tion from the body, growing thereby into its condition as wisdom or
thought which is nothing but an apprehension of the souls final separa-
tion from corporeality, the intimation of its own being-towards-death.
For Socrates all thought, as a form of practising death (80e), should
be directed towards this end. The soul becomes itself, identifies itself,
through this meditation on death. As the epigraph from Montaigne
echoed, philosopher, cest apprendre mourir. And one could go
further and conclude from Socrates that if death is the most appropri-
ate state for the soul because it is the most non-corporeal and the most
intellectual state, then such a death cannot be told apart from the pure
exercise of the intellect, that is wisdom or philosophy.6
And yet this solemn task of thought may be forgotten. I can think of
three responses to this bizarre opportunity which humans possess of
forgetting about the one thing of which they are certain, the fact that
we shall die. The first response comes by turning the question round to
make it not how is it possible to forget about death? but how would it
be possible to have to remember it? What would it mean for something
that it would absolutely have to be remembered, to the extent that it
absolutely would be remembered for certain? For if something must be
remembered absolutely with an absoluteness not to be circumscribed

Memento Mori 33
and therefore will be remembered in each case, then the notion of

memory, paradoxically, no longer makes sense and falls away. The cer-
tainty that death would for sure be remembered because it absolutely
had to be would do away with the responsibility at the heart of memory,
the responsibility which counts simultaneously as memorys possible
failure and its only chance. It would no longer be necessary to remember
death because death would absolutely have to be remembered. Under an
absolute injunction there can be no question of its being forgotten; we
need no reminding to remember it. An absolute injunction to remember
amounts to an invitation to forget. A responsibility conditions memory,
injects it with a kind of free will, making it real by giving it the chance
to select and to default on what it collects and recollects. Which is as
much as to say that memory qua memory can never be absolute. If not
structured by the possibility of forgetting, the experience of memory
would become mere programmatic, unreflective, irresponsible retention
that would involve no remembering as such at all.
This would be the first response to Pascal. How is it possible to forget
about death? Because it is impossible absolutely to remember it. The
possibility that I forget it furnishes the condition of my remembering.
Only insofar as I might forget it does my remembering death become
meaningful.
This paradox may be transposed onto an ethical plane to produce a
second response. It may look like hubris or disrespect that from time to
time I forget about death in its absoluteness, its sovereignty, its author-
ity, but thats just how memory works. Thus I remember-and-forget,
respect death and disrespect it. This reveals something about the ethics
of respect. The call to respect death, such as Pascals, unfortunately
cannot be answered in a straightforward way. To respect death faith-
fully, to acknowledge its precedence and incontrovertibility, requires
two irreconcilable gestures simultaneously, and this applies to all forms
of respect. The practice of respect demands on the one hand that I
concern myself with its object (in this case death), that I take it to myself,
dwell on it, incorporate it and as it were watch over it, care for it, my
respectful concern drawing me to an appropriation of it, a becoming
busy with it, an allowing of it to fill me up, to learn it, to study it, to
know it, become instructed in it and give myself over to it in its differ-
ence and otherness from me; but on the other hand and owing precisely
to that difference and otherness, my respect for death enjoins on me the
contrary gesture, of letting it go, respecting it as other, as different and
distinct from me, needing to be released, never to suffer the injury and
inappropriateness of my appropriation of it, my intentions for it, my
crude assimilation which would turn its otherness into my sameness

34 Death-Drive
and thus no longer respect it as it. Respect in general and the respect
for death in particular necessitates this ambiguous intention both to
know and not to know, to solicit and to relinquish, and thus my forget-
ting about death contains an ethical rightness in performing one half
of the divided gesture that respect demands, that of letting go, of the
movement towards not knowing at all about death, giving up any rights
over it, as a sign of my respect for it. Risk, rather than truth, informs
the concept of respect, for not to incorporate and not to know death in
the respecting of it runs the risk of disregarding, abandoning and thus
disrespecting it altogether. It is within this horizon of risk that the ethics
of respect emerges. What would an ethics be which didnt involve some
responsibility and therefore risk, imperfect knowledge, prior hesitation
and the freedom that derives from having no certain, prescribed course
of action to pursue? The decorum of respect entails an essential anxiety
in the perpetual struggle between an apprehension of its object (death in
this case) and a non-apprehension, one that could be said to be matched
by the interfusing and undecided movement between remembering
and forgetting. To know death as death, through the figure of absolute
respect which it imposes, is also to abjure the knowing of it. Just as I
remember-and-forget death, having no choice but to switch back and
forth, so also I acknowledge it carefully, anxiously, through knowing
and not-knowing, approaching and withdrawing, respecting it thereby
at the risk of disrespect and unobservance, this being the very risk by
which my respect achieves validity.
As for the third response as to how it is possible to forget death, we
can elaborate on the absolute injunction from the first response and
with it raise the question of force. The phrase memento mori which I
have taken as a title means remember you must die. You must die, of
course, but there are two kinds of must, two orders of obligation at
issue. First, the order of you must because you are ordered to, you
must because I tell you, you must do this or else. Some empirical stric-
ture binds you, and this stricture belongs to the realm of positive law, of
force as enforcement where a must must be enforced because it could
go unheeded. Thus the force in this first case is a symptom of a basic
weakness. If its necessary to prescribe that you stop at a red light, it is
because it is always possible for you not to; this possibility has therefore
to be countered positively by a law which says you must stop. Obviously
this is not the kind of must involved in death. The phrase remember
you must die does not stipulate that we must die because without such
a stipulation we might not. It pertains to a different category of must.
You must die because you will die, order or no order. No one could give
the order to die more strongly, more forcefully than it is already given.

Memento Mori 35
Try it. This is a law that does not need to express itself as an order and
requires no enforcement. It could be called force without force. So force-
ful that it needs no forcing, the force of mortality thus differs from the
gratuity pertaining to the first kind. And this throws up the question of
the ambiguity of force in general: force is both essentially gratuitous
where force is required, there has been some lack of force prior to it for
which it is making up but at the same time force achieves an imma-
nence within itself, a perfect entelechy whose force lies in exactly such
self-sufficiency and containment.
The phrase remember you must die belongs to the second category
of obligation. As such it requires no recollection, unlike in the first
where every time I stop at a red light I am in a sense reminded of a law
(which could in principle be forgotten). From this perspective the phrase
becomes redundant. There is no need for me to remember I must die; it
will come about regardless of my remembering it; it is simply the case
and dispenses with any need to be recalled or invoked, sublimely indif-
ferent to human apprehension of it. As a third and final response to
how is it possible to forget about death? we can therefore say that to
remember it in any case is irrelevant. A human remembering makes no
difference to it; that we must die is so unassailably true that it has no
need of being sheltered in and by our memories. And so equally we can
forget it without any consequence.
In this last aspect death becomes that which deprives us of any
meaningful psychic relation to it. We might wonder what the conse-
quences of this would be for psychologies of death, and specifically
any psychoanalysis of it. What possible ground could there be for the
death-drive, for example? The psychic pursuit of death as suggested by
Freud, the exercise of the death instincts, in a sense implies that death
must indeed be pursued as if it were not the inevitability it is. What
need a death instinct? No instinct for it is required. If the death instinct
is a drive as Freuds German word Todestrieb indicates, this drive qua
drive appears supererogatory, gratuitous, for death requires no driving
towards. Pre-emptingly it outstrips all psychic relation to it, conscious
or unconscious.7
Where, then, and how can death be apprehended? I would now like
to bridge from Pascal to Heidegger. We have begun to see some of the
difficulties in conceptualising death. Heidegger will suggest that our
mistake is in viewing death as actual rather than possible, which I shall
try to explain in a moment. In general a move that might be made is
one that takes us away from an epistemology of death, away from the
language of apprehension, away from the dimension of consciousness (a
dimension that includes unconsciousness). In relation to the last point,

36 Death-Drive
for example, about psychoanalysis, there are already resources for

thinking in a new direction. The Todestrieb finds its motor not only in
the psyche. The drive of the death-drive, according to Freud, that which
urges the psychic drive in a particular direction, lodges in the organic
determinations of psychic development, prior even to the formation of
the unconscious. If the psyche tends towards its own death, it may be
due to a phylogenetic link with its pre-psychical past as simple organism.
The death-drive comprises an a-psychic element, a purely organic or bio-
logical compulsion to return to a state of absolute simplicity that can be
called death. The point is that the psychic relation to death can be con-
ceived in a way that includes an a-psychic component. Psychoanalysis
moves in this direction, as does the fundamental ontology of Heidegger.
Both gesture towards a structural, pre-psychological relation to death of
the human being, though of the two it is Heidegger we shall pursue.
The possibility of death
Towards the very end of la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator

muses on his time running out, how age caps artistic endeavour:
For the fundamental fact was that I had a body, and this meant that I was
perpetually threatened by a double danger, internal and external, though to
speak thus was merely a matter of linguistic convenience, the truth being that
the internal danger the risk, for example, of a cerebral haemorrhage is
also external, since it is the body that it threatens. Indeed it is the possession
of a body that is the great danger to the mind, to our human and thinking life,
which it is surely less correct to describe as a miraculous entelechy of animal
and physical life than as an imperfect essay as rudimentary in this sphere as
the communal existence of protozoa attached to their polyparies or as the
body of the whale in the organisation of the spiritual life. The body immures
the mind within a fortress; presently on all sides the fortress is besieged and
in the end, inevitably, the mind has to surrender.8
We arrived at this juncture from a third response to Pascal which said

that death needed no remembering, thus frustrating psychic relation to
it. A mindbody dualism underlies the point for we are implying that
because the body is going to die anyway there is no need for the mind to
accommodate the fact of death in any fashion. Proust writes pointedly
of this disjunction, what could be called the dyschronic link between
the two systems that human beings consist in. Death discloses this
dualism between the apparent and illusory immortality of the mind and
the certain, felt mortality of the body. The mind would not necessarily
surrender were not its bodily ramparts eroding.

Memento Mori 37
True, death actually happens and it happens to the body while the
mind plausibly might survive indefinitely; similarly, the body is caught
up absolutely in times forward movement while the mind can skip
about over the surface of time, recalling, anticipating, imagining, not
shackled to the present. In these simple terms, death appears as an event,
that which comes, that which happens. The body arrives at death, or
death arrives at the body, and once the body falls the mind must fall too;
it goes down like a captain with his ship. It is an event. We think death
in terms of actual event-time. If we think of it as happening it is because
we think of its taking place in the course of such time. But in so think-
ing, Heidegger warns us, death gets passed off as always something
actual; its character as a possibility gets concealed. Let us examine this
character of possibility that death has.
Pascals vexation depended on the actuality of death, whose actuality
as actual allows for psychological cognisance of it albeit in the impeded
manner we have sketched. What, by contrast, is deaths possibility?
What kind of a possibility is death? Heidegger answers that death is
the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. What kind of
possibility is this? Two orders of possibility open up, one at the centre
of Heideggerian thought, and another which will take us away from
Heidegger through Derrida and back to De Man. The first kind of possi-
bility, the Heideggerian kind, also bears a kind of force. We have already
enumerated two kinds of force: that of positive law which requires
enforcement and that of actual death which requires no enforcement but
which in flagging death as a factum brutum depends on a rather unre-
fined materialism of the body, a biologism. Heideggerian possibility too
represents a force in that it signals power. Possibility is strong because it
gestures to its own ability, capacity, faculty, to do or to make. The Latin
posse from which the English possibility comes abbreviates the phrase
potis esse, which is having the power and the potency and the can as
the force to do something. The German Mglichkeit which Heidegger
uses for possibility relates to Macht for power. And death, for
Heidegger, marks some kind of possibility though its power, as I shall
try to show, is nothing more or less than rhetorical.
In a very general sense the force of possibility constitutes the strongest
force conceivable. It makes something possible; it claims some worldly
change; it envisions an adjustment of the very future; it forces open a
virtual space where nothing had existed. But one should not conflate
this idea with the notion that anything is possible. Virtual space, one
could say, gives the easiest space of all to open. It takes no force to open,
just a little imagination, for any possibility may be conceived there is
no resistance, at one level, in the realm of the imagination. This does

38 Death-Drive
not amount to creating the conditions for the possibility of something,

however. There is a difference between the received idea of the possible
as that which might become actual in the future and already exists in
the realm of virtual actuality, on the one hand, what we could call soft
possibility; and the possible as a transcendental condition, on the other
hard possibility perhaps. Death is a hard possibility.
How does Heidegger conceive it? It is death itself which allows us to
conceive it for, to put it baldly, death annihilates actuality per se. He
writes:
The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a pos-
sibility, is as far as possible from anything actual. The more unveiledly this
possibility gets understood, the more purely does the understanding penetrate
into it as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all. Death, as
possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be actualised, nothing which Dasein, as
actual, could itself be . . . Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibility,
is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility.9
Since actuality vanishes at death, destroyed by death, the only character

available to death can be that of possibility. Death bears the force of
the entirely non-actual Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to
be actualised. It bears the force of possibility which, qua possibility,
calls for a concept of anticipation in regard to it with the proviso that
anticipation anticipates nothing actual, belonging rather to a structure
of time that opens elsewhere than into the actual, and thus once more
pre-empts any psychological apprehension thereof. Onceness again
death never happens not so much because it never happens but because
it never happens. It is unhappening. In this sense death cannot even be
experienced. Death is an event without beginning or end. There is no
death; there is only the stopping of life, the notion of death a mere
personification of that stopping. As such its possibility will have with-
drawn from the realm of the actual and of empirical time, becoming
even harder than hard; it is hyper-transcendental. It holds the status
of something entirely structural, preceding all empiricism, all psychism,
and if this possibility has power it is the power or force of that which can
never become vulnerable because it never exists, never comes into time.
Death does not die in time. I would suggest that the deathliness of death
its sheer incontestability resides precisely in this, its having already
been constituted as possibility. On account of never being actualised
the possibility of death is effectively a perpetual possibility; but insofar
as it is also the perpetual possibility of death, the last thing it can be is
perpetual, for it must die. We are forced to think the possibility of death
as perpetual and finite at the same time.

Memento Mori 39
There are one or two comments relating to what has already been said
that may be made about this structure. Firstly, where we spoke about
the forgettability of death we can apply a new filter to our thoughts.
If we forget about death it is not only because remembering it creates
problems in the ways suggested but also because of a more stringent
reason. There is no forgetting or remembering of death to be had for,
according to Heidegger at least, its deep character is one of possibility
which pre-empts and remains absolutely foreign not just indifferent
to apprehension of it. How is it possible, other than through some
mystificatory theory of anamnesis, to remember or forget something
which entirely outflanks the actual? True, one can remember things
that are not actual, such as fictional narratives or lies, but even these
are subtended by a virtual actuality. Secondly, the notion of forgetting
and remembering we have been using has been rather naive, suggestive
of a simple consciousness at work. What about unconscious forgetting
or repression? But even here we can say that deaths possibility remains
intact for it does not appear in any form whatsoever, harbouring its
structurality, thus offering nothing of itself, no matter, to repress. If
there is repression at large it pertains to possibility as repression, as that
which will never become actualised. Which means too that death is
repression, is the object of that possibility as the impossibility of any
actualisation an impossibility which perhaps may be called absolute
repression. What more effective repression could be envisaged than one
which precludes actualisation in general?
We commonly use the word possible to refer to something which
may or may not happen; it might happen precisely to the extent it also
might not. Heideggers notion, by contrast, has the sense that the possible
certainly will not happen, death forcing the paradox, it being the pos-
sibility of the impossibility of any existence at all. Why does he not use
the word necessity for this condition? Why does he not write that death
is the necessity of the impossibility of any existence at all? One could
venture answers such as because necessity belongs to the order of actu-
ality whereas death is nothing actual, but there is a more fruitful line. In
our quotation Heidegger said that Being-towards-death, as anticipation
of possibility, is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free
as possibility. As such the possibility of death is created not given, made
by Being-towards-death, and to this extent contingent.
But isnt that preposterous? Can death really be contingent? Can
it (death!) lack transcendental force? Lets read Heideggers sentence
again: Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibility, is what
first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility. We
could object that there will have had to be death before its being made

40 Death-Drive
possible by Being-towards-death, if only because the latter is just that,

Being-towards-death, aiming at the death it purports to make possible.
Yet Being-towards-death, as Being-towards-death must indeed precede
death, for there must be Being in some form in order for there to be
death (and in this sense also death is contingent on the existence of
living things which, as living, can die; there would be no death if there
were no life, this suggesting an important respect in which death differs
from nothingness which must be absolutely uncontingent). There is a
contingency of death, then, in that its possibility must be made, created
rather than received, but a contingency not to be confused with the con-
tingency of what might have been otherwise, with the optional. It was
not possible for this possibility of death not to be made for it inheres in
Being as Being-towards-death, but all this does not quite add up to a
necessity, and it is in the space that the spectrality and rhetoric of death
opens up.
Death persuades me with an image
In deference to the work of Nietzsche, Ricoeur, De Man and Derrida on

it, I elect the term promise to indicate this space where necessity and
contingency overlap and where possibility is perpetual yet finite. Death
may be inevitable but not so inevitable and not so transcendentally
forceful that its possibility exists prior to being made; it necessarily will
happen, but rather a fortiori than a priori, its necessity depleted by the
fact that its happening is not an actuality but a possibility; and as pos-
sibility one which, moreover, requires being made it also depends. It
is simultaneously necessary and contingent and to capture the internal
energy of this aporetic link the notion of the promise appears helpful.
A promise also is both necessary and contingent, assuring an outcome
while risking exposure to all that precedes it. Death appears both neces-
sary and contingent and can only be possible because it will itself have
done away with actuality, so all it can ever do is promise itself. There
will never be an actuality of fulfilment for it.
This promissory structure of death represents the other kind of possi-
bility mentioned above. The first was of a more orthodox Heideggerian
kind, shall we say, of the possibility of death as something structural.
While not opposing Heidegger in this new view we are nonetheless
finding room in his account for thought of a distinctly post-Heideggerian
kind. As promise death begins to appear both speculative and rhetori-
cal. It therefore continues to defy any epistemic certainty we might have
about it, remaining without determinate content. In this respect we

Memento Mori 41
truly are departing from Heidegger who contrasts the being certain with
regard to ones death with cases in which one merely has a view about
something or another. In the same section as quoted of Being and Time
he talks of the kind of certainty that applies in any arbitrary fiction or
in merely having some view [Ansicht]: in such cases, he says, the
kind of certainty one has about death is lacking.10 There exist in other
words two distinct and even opposite types of certainty, one exclusively
to do with death, the other with having a view about arbitrary things in
general. But from what we have seen, very little difference obtains in fact
between our supposed certainty about death and the relation we might
have to something arbitrary or fictional. For if death, bearing nothing
that could be actualised yet sustaining possibility, is structured like a
promise, and thus has a character that is both rhetorical and speculative,
then we can be certain about it only in the mode of the kind of trust or
credulousness we bring to the reception of just such arbitrary fictions.
And all the more so in that the promise does not pertain to real time, to
the time of actuality. A transcendental promise engages us, one which
does not bind itself to an empirical future but which, like a fiction, takes
place in the realm of pure possibility. Indeed the arbitrariness is crucial.
In terms of force this means that although absolutely certain, death
can never be stronger than a promise. It is both absolutely certain and
not absolutely certain, for the mode of its certainty, taking place outside
actuality, thereby renders the certainty inaccessible. It becomes abso-
lutely certain precisely because not subject to that actuality which would
always maintain some threat, no matter how small, to certainty, in that
it could vary events unpredictably; but in becoming so very certain, the
certainty of death becomes impossible to establish. Hence the force of
death interrupts itself in making itself absolute. It has to weaken itself
to be as forceful as it is. It has become so forceful that it has absconded
from and even done away with the realm in which its force can be
expressed, for it has obliterated actuality. It has reached the level of
a hyper-absoluteness in which mere absoluteness has been superseded
with the both weaker and stronger quasi-absoluteness of a promise,
and so on and so forth. Having becoming slightly weaker through its
absolute strength, it must resort to a kind of sublime rhetoric to affirm
its force.
In terms of being, however, things appear simpler at first sight.
Nothing in the transcendental workings of the promise disturbs the
being to which it appends. Yes, its relation to death in Being-towards-
death gets complexified by the promise, but being stays in place as
the promises transcendental referent or counterweight. To this extent
our analysis remains soundly metaphysical, upholding a tradition of

42 Death-Drive
thinking about the promise as a kind of stabilising element in concepts

of being. In another De Man essay, for example, the author says in a
footnote that Nietzsche derives the transcendental referent, man, from
the promise:11 man is distinguished from animals by his capacity to syn-
thesise his identity forcefully over time and making promises affords a
pre-eminent modality of such continuity; man outfaces the contingency
of history, wilfully positing his promise and thus himself as what will
override the future. I shall come back to this, the point for now being
that the promise offers a means of configuring the future according to
ones will, thus in a sense anthropomorphising time, assuring the onto-
logical power of the one animal capable of making promise man, who
achieves a transcendental continuity, a self-necessity in the face of the
accidents otherwise looming. Paul Ricoeur makes a similar point though
with an emphasis more on the duty to the future than the mastery over
it of the promising animal. For Ricoeur the promise binds its maker to
the future in an ethical way which enjoins responsibilities on him or her
and again an ontological substrate forms.12
But surely the transcendental promise as we have introduced it would
fail to support an ontology? Not only does it not pertain to an actual
time in which being could be sustained but it promises the non-actual-
isation of being per se. And besides, the promise of death is not made
by anyone, is not the object of an intention, thus one could not derive
a subjective agent for it with ontological properties. The promise of
death must indeed concern the death of being or of a being for as we
said, only being can die and to this extent we cannot simply deny or
bypass the ontological dimension; but at the same time we are obliged
to consider a more enigmatic kind of death which radiates at the limit of
ontology. We must try to think this very difficult aspect of death.
As promised death is coming but not as anything actual. In this sense it
does not come at all; it cannot come for there is no actuality for it to pen-
etrate. Its coming conforms rather to an already-here. What is promised
has already been given for though only ever promised it cannot be deferred
since no actuality exists into which to project it. It will have already insinu-
ated itself. This would be the structure raised by the transcendental or
rather quasi- or hyper-transcendental promise. Death consigns us not only
to an actual death to come but also to a being already dead; contained
in the towards of Being-towards-death is an echo of the death that has
preceded it, thus one travels towards the thing one has departed from.
In this respect actual death, the common-sense version of death, might
look like the typological fulfilment or the prophetic completion of the
death that has taken place surreptitiously beforehand. In dying one is
catching up with death as in a kind of delayed effect, and in saying this

Memento Mori 43
I have in mind not only theoretical work on this subject by Freud,

of course, in terms of Nachtrglichkeit and by iek in not dissimilar
terms13 but also a couple of fictions. There is Tolstoys Death of Ivan
Ilyich (to which Heidegger devotes a footnote in Being and Time),14 for
example, and a later fiction by Don DeLillo called Mao II which seems
tacitly to invoke Tolstoys story. Ivan, having suffered the vicissitudes of
a civil service career in Russia, eventually secures a prestigious post in St
Petersburg. Full of pride he buys a house in the city for his family and
sets about decorating it:
He was so taken up with it all that he often did things himself, rearranging
the furniture or the hangings. Once when mounting a step-ladder to show a
workman, who did not understand, how he wanted some material draped, he
made a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile person he clung on
and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame. The bruise
was painful but it soon passed off. All this time, indeed Ivan Ilyich felt
particularly alert and well. I feel fifteen years younger, he wrote.15
That trivial knock to his side turns out to be fatal and it works like a
memento mori. The story is written so as to suggest the prior necessity
of the death, with implications for the vanity of human ambition. The
long remainder of the story details the time-lag, so to speak, of the stay
of execution, the gap between Ivans having already died in the knock,
his actual death at the end of the tale, and the background sense of the
knock on the side marking the irruption of an already-deadness of the
man. In DeLillos story the hero, a writer, on a trip to Israel, receives a
slight knock to his side from a car as he steps off a pavement. According
to a similar, even identical, structure, the knock turns out to be fatal as
if some malign promise has been awakened.16
This promise, this strangely contingent but indubitable necessity
which cannot be proved because never actualised, this promise of being
already dead entombs its subject, gives it over even in the midst of its
actual life to a kind of mourning. If already dead by this promise the
living being has a kind of monumentality conferred upon him or her.
In other words the mourning process begins with the beginning of life
for life is already a kind of death, the being which lives it promised to
a death anterior to it. Life begins and continues with a protest against
this constant monumentalisation, against the ceaseless becoming-dead
and sclerosis which makes every image of it a death-mask. In terms of
the forgettability of death we could therefore offer a fourth response
to Pascal. There can be no forgetting of death at all, transcendentally
speaking, for every image I have of myself or anyone becomes a remem-
bering of them as dead even while alive, a precocious mourning. My

44 Death-Drive
very self-consciousness becomes posthumous. Every image I have of

every animate thing arrives as an object of mourning; though I may
forget about death I cannot forget the deathliness of the dead who live
around me. And in turn I am subject to the uncontrollable reproduc-
tion of myself as dead in the images of me carried by others. Hardened
into an image object, my deathly being proliferates irregularly in these
fissiparous, sculptural, pseudo-aesthetic forms.
One of a number of inferences derived by Derrida from this situa-
tion reveals a sheer forcelessness on the part of actual death.17 Actual
death fails to register, it makes no difference: I can be remembered as
dead before dying; actual death does not alter the mode of my being
remembered. Rather it is the transcendental promise of death which has
power over me, and a hyperbolic power to boot for the promise delivers
me over to the other who will have begun mourning for me not just
to a singular other, either, but to the possibility of an endless division
and dissemination of my image among every other in general. This is
power or force as sheer reproduction and augmentation, reiteration,
regeneration, repetition and so on, which is in principle infinite. The
promise speaks with a rhetoric that affirms the fission of my self, thus
my self-identity and my very being, firing it into a myriad specular struc-
ture where I am trapped behind glass so to speak, imaged in the other
a million times over. I describe it as rhetoric not only on account of its
force, that of identity explosion, but also because as we must never
forget it remains without a basis in actuality, with all the rhetorical
certainty of the unprovable for this is where rhetoric springs up, in the
absence of an apodictic truth. Meanwhile the force of being for its part
must consist in resistance to this promise which saturates it but cannot
be confronted, the promise that it is already dead, already mourned for,
already turned into an icon and thus, before being even begins, already
appropriated by the other. And Derrida makes another inference from
this, namely that the a priori confusion of my self with the other means
that the being I have and which dies will not be entirely my own, that
the other always dies my death with me and the mineness of my death
fails to soak it all up. Which would fly in the face of one of the essential
characteristics of death mentioned at the beginning of this discussion,
namely that my death is always my own and none can die it for me.
Once again: such celerity in dying
We have looked with reference to Pascal at some of the problems in con-

ceptualising actual death. We then at Heideggers prompting changed

Memento Mori 45
the discussion to the level of possibility at which death, though neces-

sary, gives nothing to be actualised, thus creating for itself the character
of a perpetual promise. This promise, rather than projecting an actual
future, lay in a possibility which as such inhabited a space of the already.
The already of the promise of death led in turn to the being-mourned-
by-the-other which affects all living things. But our inquiry began with,
and here and there referred back to, the onceness of death. This once-
ness reappears at the juncture we have reached and I shall conclude this
chapter with some remarks about it.
It transpires that rather than dying once I die again and again through
the other, in the others image of me. My self-identity such as it is gets
posited outside myself in unconnected acts deriving from the rhetoric
of a promise. And it is not just rhetoric but fiction which springs up
for these images of me abound from my death or absence and are thus
not controlled by veracity. They begin with my absence or death, my
removal from actuality, thus apocryphal by nature; they can be mul-
tiplied and distorted without reference back to a living me, without
ratification from anything actual. Derrida says the origin of fiction lies
in mourning, in just such apocryphal figuration as he calls it.18 This
generative figuration makes me die over and over in different, distorted
non-self-identical versions, makes me die even as it preserves me in
multifarious forms.
It is perhaps little wonder then that Paul de Man associates rhetoric
with death, as we said back in the first paragraph. De Man wants to
stress the true force of both rhetoric and death as stemming from their
violent randomness, their absolute disruptiveness and discontinuity. In
the essay referred to earlier, for example, he writes that:
[Shelleys] The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word,
thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything
that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose
power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.19
It is what makes him also deconstruct the Nietzschean concept of the

promise we referred to, as that which sustains over time and thus ideal-
ises the identity of its wilful, forceful maker. For De Man there would
be a force of the promise greater than that of the person who makes it in
that the promise fails, precisely, to sustain the identity of its maker over
time. It would be an act of violent positing without recuperation, some-
what along the lines we have laid out. The promise of death such as we
have described it allows for an absolute randomness in the imaging of
me by the other who can make images, posit figurations of me in an arbi-
trary and fictive manner. Thus I am indeed posited, but posited only in

46 Death-Drive
the de Manian, rhetorical sense, as a series of linguistic acts which bear

no ideal relation to one another and no transcendental relation to the
referent, the me, they derive from. For I begin, begin to be, only within
the possibility of this prior distortion and appropriation. A rhetorical
machine will have begun to randomly posit my being outside myself
owing to the fact that this being is promised to the possibility, rather
than the actuality, of death. In this light death appears as the radical
intermission of my being per se.
This allows us to conclude that death may indeed remain unknowable
in its happening only once. But it happens only once again and again in
these severely truncated rhetorical acts that ought not be humanised into
a meaningful chain. Each time, each toll of death, is a one-off in that I
am fictively distorted in each case, thus bearing only accidental and not
essential similarity to myself from one time to the next. A principle of
confusion is at work, therefore, allowing me also to be mistaken and
misprised. The distortion of my image operates by such a principle of
confusion, allowing for mistaken identity, projection, prosopagnosia
and the dreams of others deaths.
Notes
1. Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding, in On Textual Understanding
and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1986), pp. 13ff.
2. Paul de Man, Shelley Disfigured, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 122. See below for quotation.
3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), p. 307.
4. Blaise Pascal, A Letter to Further the Search for God, in Penses and
Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995), pp. 1602.
5. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans.
Stephen Mitchell (London: Picador, 1980), p. 155:
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even ones own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
6. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington

Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 636.
7. See in particular Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE, XVIII, pp. 164.

Memento Mori 47
8. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 3, trans. Terence

Kilmartin, Andreas Mayor and C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981), p. 1092.
9. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), pp. 3067.
10. Ibid., p. 300.
11. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press, 1979), p. 273.
12. See Paul Ricoeur, Self as Ipse, in Barbara Johnson (ed.), Freedom and
Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992 (New York: BasicBooks,
1993), pp. 10319.
13. For references to Freuds use of this term see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis,
The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:
Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1988), pp. 11114;
Slavoj iek, You Only Die Twice, in The Sublime Object of Ideology
(London: Verso, 1989), pp. 13149.
14. An essay on Heideggers footnote by Robert Bernasconi, Literary
Attestation in Philosophy: Heideggers Footnote on Tolstoys The Death
of Ivan Ilyich, appears in David Wood (ed.), Philosophers Poets (London:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 736.
15. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Rosemary
Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 121.
16. Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1991).
17. See Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay,
Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986).
18. Ibid., p. 34.
19. Paul de Man, Shelley Disfigured, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 122.

Chapter 2
The Death-Drive Does Not Think
Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging

these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a
certain sense they constitute thinking as such. (Nietzsche)
My title alludes to an essay by Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Dream-
Work Does Not Think,1 which in turn alludes to Freuds Interpretation
of Dreams. The issue is whether the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis
construes the individual psyche as having any capacity to think whatso-
ever. It might be problematised thus: if the psychic mechanism is com-
pelled to repeat, can any of its intellections be considered as thought or
cogitation, as opposed to Pavlovian reaction? The compulsion to repeat
is one perhaps the arch element making the psychic mechanism
mechanical, hence the structural role it plays, and consequently its toler-
ance of being notated and theorised. Theoretically it calls for a concept of
the death-drive whose presence it betrays: we repeat patterns of mental
and social behaviour so as to keep psychic expenditure to a minimum,
not risking any authentically new investments, preferring old wine in
new bottles no matter how sour in reality it always was. This profoundly
conservative attitude is tantamount to a death-drive insofar as a state of
minimum exertion, or maximum inertia, is its telos its end, purpose
and nature. Thought, were that activity to contain any requirement of
intellectual effort, would be anathema to it and could be countenanced
only in circumstances where it represented the sole remaining route back
to the state of rest, repetition having become for whatever reason unvi-
able. We are practically describing, in Nietzsches words, the attempt to
win for man an approximation to what in certain animals is hibernation,
in many tropical plants estivation, the minimum metabolism at which
life will still subsist without really entering consciousness.2 We can dis-
close an intimate negative connection between thinking and death as vis
inertiae, a connection which orients the present chapter.
That connection itself connects with a third element, time with

The Death-Drive Does Not Think 49
public time and therefore with history, for history is public time, to
quote from a source I shall return to. How so?
In the aspect of Freudian theory which concerns us, concentrated in
the paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the psyche shirks anything
but the least exertion possible. For reduction of excitation equals pleas-
ure: an equation that is legitimate because congruent with the Freudian
premise which is not I am so much as I wish. For the Freudian psyche,
establishing ontological identity is secondary to fulfilling wishes (Lacan
would seem to re-philosophise this position by restoring the former to
equal prominence). I wish, therefore I am, and pleasure furnishes the
constant object of my actions.3 Freud lends this axiom genetic cladding
which I re-describe as follows.
The Oedipal phase occurs when the infant understands the father to
be a check to its own access to the mother, imposing the stricture of
delay upon the child for whom, in effect, a sense of time is created. To
adapt the language of Kant, time arises subjectively as the form of the
intuition that there now exists a block to what was previously porous,
that I now have to pay for what before was free, that satisfaction has
turned out to be a privilege and not a right; time impinges upon me as
limit and frustration and the necessity of supererogation. Time implies
the other and vice versa: if now I have a sense of time it is because the
other, whose type is the father, inhabits the same wish-dimension and
thus creates the competition which means that in principle I will not
always be the first to get what I want and that I will have to bestir myself
to make sure of getting it at all. An economy is born.
The genetic schema allows for the psychologistic interpretation that
preoccupies psychoanalysis as a therapeutic institution. For example,
if the father impedes my wish-fulfilment, the formative attitude I hold
toward him is that of vengeful rival, while in this moment of Oedipal
pathos in a sense the first moment of pathos of any kind in the infants
young life I realise I love the mother, though it is only in the context of
hating the father that loving the mother has any meaning or value. I am
now conscious of my wishes even though, cruelly enough, this coincides
with the consciousness that they may well remain unfulfilled. Such is
the condition of consciousness, in truth. In its circularity the argument
resembles that concerning the Big Bang and the origin of time. For I
now have wishes only because some obstacle to them has new-fangled
them as wishes, whereas in the pre-lapsarian phase I had neither wish
nor no-wish, I merely prosecuted my animal functions without either
consciousness or unconsciousness. A wish is inherently retrospective: I
want has no psychoanalytic currency; only I have always wanted can
claim that. It resembles the Big Bang paradox in that the pre-lapsarian

50 Death-Drive
world lacked all temporal attributes so could not have been a state of
pre- at all. The nature of time having been established as medium of
wish-fulfilment, the prevailing object of wishing can be apprehended as
occupying a mythic and impossible absolute past. The psyche is con-
signed to seeking out shadows of that object in the Platonic after-time
that is real time, trusting that the anamnesic affect of such shadows will
retain enough aura from the original to afford a modicum of fulfilment,
or, more naively, taking the shadow for the real thing. Whence the com-
pulsion to repeat and save time, to hearken back to the origin that is like
a hologram.
Among the less naive of course, Freuds contemporary Walter
Benjamin will have said in another context that aura only fades with
each (mechanical, but the psyche is also mechanical) reproduction.4 He
is speaking about the reproduction of works of art, but his co-religionist
Theodor Adorno held opinions about repetition directed more specifi-
cally at psychoanalysis. The latter was one of a number of btes noires
for Adorno, and precisely because he felt or feared psychoanalysis to be
inimical to thought (and thus also to himself). In psychoanalysis, ratio
is degraded to rationalisation, writes Adorno in the course of some
astonishingly dyspeptic paragraphs in Minima Moralia.5 Compared
with the relatively magnanimous Aristotelian moralia to which the title
of his book cuttingly alludes, ethical life in the psychoanalytic domain
is reduced to economic rationalisations that are part and parcel with
bourgeois self-alienation. Exactly so: the paradigm of all social rela-
tions for the Freudian psyche is the infantile relation with the father.
Any social life that gathers thereafter can at best dissimulate the filial
competition that provides its deep structure and motive. It is just this
dissimulating competitiveness and goal-seeking that lends social life its
bourgeois and alienated character, Adorno rather maladroitly dismiss-
ing any notion of sublimation which might make of such dissimula-
tion a redeeming feature. If Freud says that the sublimation of Oedipal
pressure produces society, Adorno retorts it is not worth having the
bourgeois society that is produced, and against it he opposes the civilised
society of tact and good manners.
Characteristic of Adornos utopia is an authentic, dialectical quality
in social relations, which means that they must be able to develop out
of the crypto-primal state that Freud promises for them. The real time
of Adorno is realler than the real time of Freud, so to speak, since the
real time of Adorno contains dialectical, and we could even say musical,
recapitulation and progression. These are the features of enlightenment,
recapitulation implying listening to the other in a genuine social and
concernful manner, progression the cultivating effects of that openness

to learning and miscibility. Instancing Beethoven and Kant, Adorno will

reach through to his fantasy of the tactful society. He says that there is
a sense in which Beethovens regular recapitulations following dynamic
explosions, Kants deduction of scholastic categories from the unity of
consciousness, are eminently tactful.6 Regular recapitulations fol-
lowing dynamic explosions express the humanistic variety, the capacity
for both social observance and individual endeavour, that are razed by
the monotony and isolation of a Freudian pseudo-culture. The dialecti-
cal opportunity that tact brings with it encourages critical thought in
the Kantian tradition, where cultivated speculation harmonises with
a benign universal, and where Sapere aude! can come into its own
because such audacity will be both secured and respectfully admired by
the society one lives in. Adornos bluster against psychoanalysis stems
from a conviction that thought is naturally dialectical, that it takes place
in a time making possible the dialectical difference that defines it. It
demands the postulation of a real time, in other words, that is the possi-
bility of advancement and change, of difference, of relation and of social
relation in particular the music of society. Politically that results in the
well remarked-upon idiosyncrasy of Adornos position: it combines a
squirearchical gentility with radical critique. Psychoanalysis on the other
hand appears to circumscribe severely this possibility of change which
is also the possibility of thought, arguing that change is little more than
repetition disguised.
Headed This side of the pleasure principle, here is the major part
of paragraph 37, from which ratio is degraded to rationalisation was
quoted:
The repressive traits in Freud have nothing to do with the want of human
warmth that business-like revisionists point to in the strict theory of sexual-
ity. Professional warmth, for the sake of profit, fabricates closeness and
immediacy where people are worlds apart. It deceives its victim by affirming
in his weakness the way of the world which made him so, and it wrongs him
in the degree that it deviates from truth. If Freud was deficient in such human
sympathy, he would in this at least be in the company of the critics of political
economy, which is better than that of Tagore or Werfel. The fatality was
rather that, in the teeth of bourgeois ideology, he tracked down conscious
actions materialistically to their unconscious instinctual basis, but at the same
time concurred with the bourgeois contempt for instinct which is itself a
product of precisely the rationalisations he dismantled. He explicitly aligns
himself, in the words of the Introductory Lectures, with the general evalua-
tion . . . which places social goals higher than the fundamentally selfish sexual
ones. As a specialist in psychology, he takes over the antithesis of social and
egoistic, statically, without testing it. He no more discerns in it the work of
repressive society than the trace of the disastrous mechanisms that he has
himself described. Or rather, he vacillates, devoid of theory and swaying with

52 Death-Drive
prejudice, between negating the renunciation of instinct as repression con-

trary to reality, and applauding it as sublimation beneficial to culture. In this
contradiction something of the Janus-character of culture exists objectively,
and no amount of praise for healthy sensuality can wish it away. In Freud,
however, it leads to a devaluation of the critical standard that decides the
goal of analysis. Freuds unenlightened enlightenment plays into the hands of
bourgeois disillusion. As a late opponent of hypocrisy, he stands ambiva-
lently between the desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and
apology for open oppression. Reason is for him a mere superstructure, not
as official philosophy maintains on account of his psychologism, which has
penetrated deeply enough into the historical moment of truth, but rather
because he rejects the end, remote to meaning, impervious to reason, which
alone could provide the means, reason, to be reasonable: pleasure. Once this
has been disparagingly consigned to the repertoire of tricks for preserving the
species, and so itself exposed as a cunning form of reason, without considera-
tion of that moment in pleasure which transcends subservience to nature,
ratio is degraded to rationalisation [. . .]
It is the alloyed and Janus-like quality of psychoanalysis that is most
vexatious. It provokes the oxymoronic flourish regarding Freuds unen-
lightened enlightenment, that epiphenomenon of bourgeois irresolution.
The materialism of psychoanalytic thinking so far so good has only
gone so far, and as such realises in all its horror the latent recidivism
of the Enlightenment accompanying it ab ovo, which Adorno theorises
elsewhere.7 The fatal mixedness of the Enlightenment programme has
allowed to spawn upon it both the bourgeoisie and the fascism which
is the tendency of the bourgeoisie for the bourgeois all share the same
goals, making them despicably uniform. The fatality was [. . .] that, in
the teeth of bourgeois ideology, [Freud] tracked down conscious actions
materialistically to their unconscious instinctual basis, but at the same
time [my italics, but Adornos exasperation is unmistakeable] concurred
with the bourgeois contempt of instinct which is itself a product of pre-
cisely the rationalisations that he dismantled. Instinct? It is clear that
Adorno means instinct for pleasure instinct as pleasure which Freud
has disparagingly consigned to the repertoire of tricks for preserving
the species. Instinct: by which Adorno signals something very different,
not the pleasure reducible to phylogenetics, but that relaxed erotism of
the social sphere, aesthetic cultivation, Periclean intercourse, the philia
of the tactful society. In typical bourgeois fashion Freud has crushed
all hope of such an ideal with his rebarbative contempt for instinct
(though the ideal will be revived some years later by Roland Barthes).
If only Freud could have seen that such contempt is itself a product of
precisely the rationalisations that he dismantled! Then he would have
gone the whole way, and the Enlightenment might have grown up rid of
its tendency to totalitarianism and the mechanisation of psycho-social

behaviour. It might have enjoyed the unambiguous efflorescence always

meant for it.
But if we apply an Adornian filter to our view of Freud, that bourgeois
world is just what people want, and the economically-driven state can
only be the winner by it, for the psyche of its subjects is predisposed to
economic competition and complicity in mass production as a form of
repetition. Not only that but a state that assumes, as it can all too easily,
the iconic power of the father will be practically unassailable. A state
driven by social-political ideals such as Adornos, on the other hand, will
find the administration of such subjects far more problematic, since the
generation of political interest and will goes against their post-Enlight-
enment natures and, since only education could be an effective means,
it will be costly a price presumably worth paying, even if Adorno
wants to keep money and civilised culture quite separate. While thought
implies society for Adorno, on account of its dialectical structure, it is to
be differentiated sharply from the commerce implied in society.
This paradox constitutes something of a topos, the preservation of
culture and thought from filthy lucre, though it may be possible to date
it by looking at the Enlightenment from the other end, and from a quite
different point of view. The Cambridge historian J. G. A. Pocock traces
that topos, in Britain at any rate, to a Romantic reaction at the turn into
the nineteenth century against the explosion of commercialisation in the
century or so after 1688. And it is really on this last date that his gaze
settles, seeing the Whig revolution as a profound transitionary period
that ushered in the Enlightenment. Our interest in this period is that
Pocock argues, contra Adorno, for the strong bind yoking together com-
merce, speculation, thought and the bourgeoisie. The Enlightenment
is inconceivable apart from bourgeois eminence, so much so that the
latter actually functions as a condition of possibility for the former. At
the same time, however, those texts which Pocock fastens upon, Hume,
Gibbon, Smith, inter alia, classics of the Enlightenment, are written
largely in reaction to this condition. That ambiguity typifies the age, and
I shall first say something about it.
Pocock analyses the transition period in Britain from the seventeenth
to the eighteenth centuries (I refer especially to his 1985 collection
Virtue, Commerce and History).8 Transition is the operative word:
in the post-Restoration world what fascinates Pocock is the transition
from landed to mobile property which brings with it broadly a transition
from, in terms Pocock grafts from Machiavelli, a virtuous to a com-
mercial and even corrupt social atmosphere but social atmosphere
is also the result of the general transition, from the political to the same
social. On one side of this transition then are landed property, virtue and

54 Death-Drive
politics; on the other side mobile property, commerce, society and also
the cultivation of manners. But the shift is not simple, and the interest
of reading Pocock derives from his attention to the ambivalence as two
sides of a transition continue to act upon one another, particularly as
invoked in the texts of reaction which are already deploring the forked
genesis of what would become known as the Enlightenment. In the
figure of this ambivalence we as readers are observing a phenomenon
that is at once radically and exclusively conceptual but dressed up in
historical clothes; or perhaps psychological-political, but again dressed
up in historical clothes; and thoroughly historical since the very concept
of manners, for example, could have received its gestation nowhere else
than in that very particular historical soil. The notion of a persistence of
transition, in other words, is a very rich paradox. It could be said, but
I shant elaborate on it, that Pococks own repetition compulsion is at
play, in that the same ambivalence is targeted by him in diverse writings
throughout the eighteenth century, thus calling into question what is
meant by history in this fecund body of work. The transition is obvi-
ously so profound that it becomes the very form of political history, its
terms as well as its object, in the British eighteenth century. If the two
sides of the transition do continue to act upon one another then their
more hospitable locus will be not history, which will tend to separate
them across time, but the mental configuration of history that we call
thought, permitting them to oscillate together. Pocock addresses works
of political theory themselves from Locke to Burke leading to an
emphasis on language. As the introduction leaves little room for doubt-
ing, language is the element of political history, but of course is also
the medium where it is represented. Pococks method too is intrinsically
confused with his object an observation, not a criticism.
It was from Pococks book that the epigram, history is public time,
was taken, from an essay entitled Modes of Political and Historical
Time in Early 18th Century England. As Pocock would no doubt be
surprised to learn (given the aspersions he casts towards it), the epigram
agrees well with a psychoanalysis according to which the minimal predi-
cate of time is the public exposure that attends upon the relation to the
father in the Oedipal phase. That is when the child enters history, or
rather when history begins for the child that is, public time is a tautol-
ogy. Pocock goes on to distinguish public from social time, the former
being institutional and the latter more generally discursive, though this
need not detain us. In conformity with the methodological imbrication
just noted, the essay, the most speculative in the volume, takes specula-
tion itself as one of its themes. It detects an emergence of speculation in
the period originating in the establishing of the Bank of England in 1696

and more particularly in the institution of the National Debt. I quote

two paragraphs in the course of which Pocock does not balk at using the
language of wish-fulfilment himself:
The National Debt was a device permitting English society to maintain and
expand its government, army and trade by mortgaging its revenues in the
future. This was sufficient to make it the paradigm of a society now living to
an increasing degree by speculation and by credit: that is to say, by mens
expectations of one anothers capacity for future action and performance.
Since a credit mechanism was an expansive and dynamic social device, the
beliefs men had to form and maintain concerning one another were more
than simple expectations of anothers capacity to pay what he had borrowed,
to perform what he had promised; they were boomtime beliefs, obliging men
to credit one another with capacity to expand and grow and become what
they were not. Far more than the practice of trade and profit, even at their
most speculative, the growth of public credit obliged capitalist society to
develop as an ideology something society had never possessed before, the
image of a secular and historical future. Without belief in the progress of the
arts, the investing mercantile society literally could not maintain itself.
But in what was belief in such a future to be rooted? Not in experience,
since there is no way of experiencing a future; not in reason, since reason
based on the perception of nature cannot well predict the exercise of capaci-
ties that have not yet been developed; not in Christian faith, since the most
apocalyptic of prophecies is not concerned to reveal the future state of the
market. There remained imagination, fantasy or passion; and Augustan
social thought is visibly obsessed at times by the spectacle of a society advanc-
ing at high speed into a world it can only imagine as existing in the forms
which it may desire. Not only must the speculative society maintain and
govern itself by perpetually gambling on its own wish-fulfilments; a new
dimension was added to that dependence of all men upon all men which
thinkers in the classical tradition wished desperately to avoid though
Christian and Hobbesian thinkers alike rather welcomed it by the immi-
nence of a state of affairs in which not only was every man in debt to every
other man, but every man was judged and governed, at every moment, by
other mens opinion of the probability that not he alone, but generations yet
unborn, would be able and willing to repay their debts at some future date
which might never even arrive. Men, it seemed, were governed by opinion,
and by opinion as to whether certain governing fantasies would ever become
realised.9
That reference to probability is interesting not least because one could

add it to the dossier of debate surrounding Ian Hackings The Taming of
Chance.10 Hacking traces to the same period the emergence of probability
theory, wondering why it emerged only then, given that the mathematical
resources to generate it had long been available. Pococks brilliant specula-
tion gives the germ of an answer, arguing for the near simultaneous nativity
of psychological and economic imagination, though the economic fact (the

56 Death-Drive
National Debt) just has the edge and so subdues the passion that would
make Pocock himself an old-fashioned Spirit of the Age historian. And in
the next but one paragraph Pocock cites Defoe the conjunction of whose
economic and literary interests as one of the new breed of men of letters
incites us to extend the speculation further still: to the novel which, along
with other novelties, newsbooks and newspapers, is rising at the time.
A novel borrows from the future in the sense of the realm experienced in
the imagining of contingencies: fiction never pays but is rather, at least in
principle, the pure expenditure of imagination, structurally has to be cred-
ited, believed, extended a kind of imaginistic overdraft. The speculative
spirit spreads through the National Debt, capitalist imagination, prob-
ability theory, novelistic fiction and the arbitrariness of making the one
cause of all the others becomes disconcertingly pressing. The rampancy of
this network might be called hysterical by Pocock: the early eighteenth
century (which by projective identification now includes himself) must
devote energy to keeping the hysteria of speculation balanced by the cul-
tivation of Opinion, what Montesquieu was later to describe as the con-
version of crdit into confiance.11 This constitutes a second ambivalence
then, the dialectic of Enlightenment tilting between opinion and hysteria,
reason and imagination, empirical and transcendental.
Time is public time (public because credit is so by definition) and
again its chief quality is delay. The delay by which payment of debt is
deferred, time is the never-never, literally, to use the colloquial phrase
for buying on credit. It is conducive to imagination and speculation,
though thought proper works of intellectual bearing, the texts Pocock
rereads is the dialectical capacity to consider imagination and reason
in dialectical combination, and is therefore at one with polity as the tem-
pering of bourgeois hysteria or credit-inflation; after all, it shortens the
speculatory delay, contracts it, bringing thought closer to real action.
Time is the suspension of real time, of the real as what comes home to
roost, as the calling in of a debt; the suspension gives buoyancy across
the board culturally, as prospecting for capital is secured by the future
archive that is credit. It is worth noting how at odds with a Weberian
notion of capital generation this schema is, and not just on the grounds
that Pocock appears to allow all religious feeling simply to evaporate
after the Civil War. Capital accumulation is the result for Weber of a
precisely counter-speculative ethos, that of the Protestant whose wealth
is merely the by-product, and yet the commendable evidence, of industry
and abstemiousness united. Speculation arises as a temptation glinting
back at you from the hard-won pile, and Weber will aptly quote John
Wesley on that dangerous supplement.12 He would have found Pococks
capitalist imagination quite contradictory.

From what we have seen of him Adorno would be bound to concur,

but then his political sympathies are manifestly remote from Pococks,
he is interested more in the fate than the origin of the Enlightenment,
and in any case what they each denote by that term is divergent to say
the least. Yet for both men thought is an enlightened, social and dialec-
tical activity, fostered by transitions, even if Pocock attributes what
would have been too much of its phenomenon, for Adornos liking, to
bourgeois venture. Without such venture Enlightenment thought would
not have been the ambivalent thing so choice for intellectual perusal,
for Pocock for Adorno the Enlightenment could have been so much
more enlightened without it look at psychoanalysis, for instance, that
unconscionable hybrid of regressive bourgeois thinking and promising
quasi-Marxist insight though one wonders how much of its dialectical
quality would have been removed in the removal of the ambivalence.
I would like to run this excursus a little further before coming back
to more recognisably psychoanalytic questions. Economic attention, the
enjoinder to expediency or contingency-as-necessity, sets the environ-
ment of the psychoanalytic subject, and to that degree it is right to spec-
ulate in an economic vein about it. It is not certain that thought that
consciousness as sceptical apprehension in a perhaps Cartesian mode
is not supplementary to such a subjects economy, though we should
concede the bad logic of this: economy is already supplementary, being
the structure that develops around the Oedipal fact that to go forward
one must first go back, that the psycho-social sphere must be a circle.
Consciousness is the consciousness only of this supplementarity, indeed
of this speculation, while the unconscious keeps the wishes in reserve
until that supplementarity which sublimates them is gone through
except during patches of thinner vigilance, like slips of the tongue, when
the wish in the form of a symptom momentarily darkens conscious time,
or more generally when that vigilance is actively encouraged to decon-
tract in the course of a session. (That suggests conversely that in the
unconscious, like in a black hole, time has no dimension, and this might
explain why narrative time in dreams appears instantaneous and why
somatic stimuli can trigger an extended dream sequence in the twinkling
of an eye. (See Chapter 7 below, The Rest of Radioactive Light, for
a discussion of this.) What interests about Adorno and Pocock, miles
apart though they be in other respects, is that both posit two types of
thought measurable in relation to the economy of supplements. There is
bourgeois thought and there is dialectical thought. Bourgeois thought,
for Pocock, thrives under conditions of credit-boom, as speculation. To
take up Pococks language thesis rather more absurdly than he may
condone: it thrives under the semantic richesse (ambivalence again) of the

58 Death-Drive
term speculation as it gestures simultaneously to mind and to market; it

is thoroughly bound into economic factors, and so is not quite thought,
in fact. Adorno sees the same bond between bourgeois thought and the
economy but chooses to be ulcered by it: calling this kind of rationalisa-
tion speculation and by extension imagination is merely to indulge it.
Genuine thought as ratio arises only as, curiously enough, something
extra to such a supplementary economy as what Derrida will call a
gift, something you get into the bargain.13 Only when the parsimony
of the market has been exceeded can dialectical thought appear as
precisely the quasi-aesthetic excess of society over economy. Though
at a remove from the market, dialectical thought for both Pocock and
Adorno has actually more reality to it. By which it is meant not only
that thought is more quintessentially itself, but that it partakes of the
real in a more necessary way: in Pocock, precisely because political-
intellectual thought abbreviates the social time which has turned into
time-as-fantasy; in Adorno, because the dialectic of thought is intrinsi-
cally social and real. On the other hand, such a dialecticity, set forth as
it is by temporal difference and cultural progress, could hardly be more
antithetical to the dialecticity of thought of Pococks thinkers, which is a
reactive fixing of time in plumb configurings, tinged with nostalgia.
Which is partly in the nature of a more conservative thinker. It cant
be deemed an intellectual fault, then, that the fantasy-time of credit and
commerce described by Pocock, so generative of the new, cannot help
but seem at once a description of Pococks own economic times. And
the attitude towards it in this case, it is Pocock embodying it has
endured too, more importantly. It is an attitude concerned to main-
tain equilibrium, to resist the futures-market and futurity per se, by,
for example, moderating the bourgeois commercial hysteria prone to
the transcendental illusion that it can get along without any empirical
anchoring by polity (= thought). Put paradoxically, real time for Pocock
is time which, by suppressing futurity, does not change over time, is not
temporal. This produces a particularly acute double bind for the histo-
rian whose subject is change over time. When the reduction of excitation
at stake I obviously want to evoke the terms of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, such that writing history itself in its more conservative
forms, to draw on all the nuances of this word can be viewed as a
form of credit control, the counter-inflationary policy that has a patho-
genesis in keeping the psyche cool. Bourgeois commercialism threatens
the albeit ambiguous stasis (ambiguous because the commercialism has
to be there in order to be moderated in order to reach stasis . . .). Since
in a sense we are talking about the very difference between thought on
the Right and thought on the Left, we might be tempted to set Adorno

up on the other side of this attitude, saying that for him it was advance-
ment not stasis that was desirable, but we would be deceived: dialectical
change affords the medium for equilibrium. For Adorno advancement
is generous equilibrium; as enlightened progress, ratio is certainly not
rationalisation, but it is rationality proportion, conceived by him in
socio-musical time. Equilibrium presents itself as the fantasy of dialecti-
cal thought. Bourgeois commercialism, liberal capitalism, may be up to
a point necessary to achieving that equilibrium, but the stronger reaction
to it is the will to its control a reaction proper to genuine thought.
The curious thing is that in a now classic debate liberal capitalism
has been reframed to answer all by itself just those desiderata of stasis,
and so at the expense of dialectics tout court. We have come to love Big
Brother. I am referring to the debate surrounding Francis Fukuyamas
The End of History and the Last Man, notably as voiced by Perry
Anderson in his own essay, The Ends of History.14 Anderson relays
Fukuyamas thesis that:
After the gigantic conflicts of the twentieth century, the unabashed victory of
economic and political liberalism over all competitors means not just the
end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period in history, but the
end of history as such: that is the end-point of mankinds ideological evolu-
tion and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form
of human government.15
Such flagrant contentiousness will of course not go uncontended, and

Anderson reserves his own criticisms until later in the essay. Meanwhile
he is content to report the torpedoings of others, for example the chorus
of disapproval at the very idea of a historical conclusion, whatever its
character:
The great majority of Fukuyamas commentators in the worlds press greeted

his argument with incredulity after all, do not common sense and daily
news tell us that there are always fresh and unexpected events, and even that
their pace is exponentially quickening, as the sensational close of the decade
demonstrates?
But this response is a non-sequitur:
Fukuyamas case allows for any number of further empirical events, as he has
pointed out: it simply contends that there is a set of structural limits within
which they will now unfold, that has been reached within the OECD zone.
Kojve [Anderson picks up a thread from earlier in the essay] replied to this
objection in his time, with characteristic vigour: the movement of history was
accelerating more and more, but it was advancing less and less all that was
happening was the alignment of the provinces.

60 Death-Drive
The end of history is the stasis of liberal capitalism as practised by

democracies in the OECD zone. History itself was a stage on the way to
it, and if there are other parts of the world where stasis has not yet been
attained it is because they are still trapped within the historical phase
that is evidenced pre-eminently by belligerence and revolution. Now it is
only a question of the alignment of [these] provinces.
As Anderson reminds us, the great change that has inspired this
version [for it belongs to a tradition] of the end of history is, of course,
the collapse of communism.16 The globe will gradually come round as a
whole to post-history, having shaken all dialecticity off itself, in a kind
of quiescent irredentism. The innovative element within this thesis is that
liberal capitalism will have gained a critical level where it can stave itself
in, round itself off. Innovative because the creation of capital is usually
perceived to be exponential, precisely, speculative, creating more of
itself out of itself, with an expansionism as its common corollary. That is
the quality highlighted by Pocock, and by Weber for that matter, in their
very different idioms. For Pocock, speaking through Gibbon, the urge
of a successfully commercial state is empire (another factor dragging it
further off course from civic republicanism in all its virtue), whereby
capital transplants itself abroad, as did Britain in America in the eight-
eenth century. How to manage this inevitable outcrop, as it were, comes
to preoccupy polity all too much and is likely to corrupt it. Which is a
secular version of Webers Protestant capitalism. Yes. Profit must be
ploughed back into the enterprise, in a phrase appropriately evocative
of Proverbs. Only then can increase of capital be a means of magnifying
God; otherwise it is external, wasteful, scatological, diabolical, sinful,
etc. corrupting. The point is that, as in the Frankenstein myth, the
desired excess, the creature of industry, transmogrifies into a burden.
Fukuyama shows no such anxiety, but mainly because, one supposes,
there is nowhere left for capital to take itself to become monstrous, the
profits of it will de facto be contained for it has felt out the very limits
of the world. The world-as-corporation may magnify itself in paradoxi-
cally unchanging form, pulsating, effectively functioning as God. All
parts have been touched by its rhetorical hand even if some still have
unfinished historical business to get through before they can answer its
irresistible call to passivity.
A thousand and one objections could still be made to Fukuyama, and
Perry Anderson presents an intimidating suite of them, but we want to
pursue an alternative agenda. Here we have a version of economy that
is no longer temporal-historical, an on the face of it strictly unthink-
able proposition to psychoanalysis. It shouldnt be called economy at
all, all historicism the dialecticity of time, and ultimately historical

consciousness too having been effaced from it in its sublimity. Time

remains, but has been released from carrying the charge of volition and
desire. Its quality of delay therefore makes no sense any more, and a per-
petual present penetrates and floods it instead. An immediate fit between
wanting and having elides the difference between them, rendering the
psychoanalytic subject a theoretic impossibility. That elision must also
sublate the distinction between private and public, for that was pro-
duced by the exigency upon wish-fulfilment to go round the houses,
that is, finding a socially acceptable way of gratifying itself. Radically,
radically democratic subjects will populate the world in the sense that
privacy as a meaningful limit to universality will have vanished.
Slavoj iek would relish this scene. In a slightly altered form, he
has written about it.17 The not-so-futuristic state is exemplified by a
film like Blade Runner where the global Corporation owns everything,
down to ones memories. Consequently, these cannot be told apart from
products; ones very psyche might be corporately manufactured and the
difference between humans and androids becomes a nice point. Again
it is a thoroughly Platonic eventuality, termed anamnesis, this remem-
bering of what has never been subjectively experienced. The memories
have been planted there by the transcendental law. A lateral interpreta-
tion might be that a truth about memory has been expressed. Namely,
that it is always possible for memory to be expropriated, and cannot be
uniquely owned. After all, it is possible to remember after ones turn the
memories of another, just as it is possible to memorise fiction which
in principle departs from the vcu. Memory is appended to provide the
pathos that defined human beings in the historical phase of the world.
Human beings are this pathos, are this capacity for remembering and
forgetting, are, rather, the defectiveness of subjective memorising. The
defectiveness is masterfully supplanted by the liberal capitalist technoc-
racy, but then put back into the system to simulate its humanity. In the
states envisioned by both iek and Fukuyama, memory can then exist
apart from experience, just as time continues though no longer recep-
tive to history always possible, for an expropriatory alterity laminates
memory de jure, its removability defines it even as it seemed the most
inalienably personal faculty a human could have had. The psyche has
been invaginated out onto this irenic plateau of conformism which
ought by rights to bleach it of all distinctive features but in fact tolerates
an amount of confected individuality. Why? Presumably as the condi-
tion under which the universal society can bind volitionally with a sem-
blance at least of coming together and thus retain its dumb telos rather
than existing as a mere aggregate. A techno-Hegelianism has achieved
its climax, technology having supervened upon Spirit as the worlds

62 Death-Drive
immanent Notion while being infinitely capable, since it is technologi-

cal and nothing but, of mocking-up the teleological repletion of Spirit
as it chooses. Techno-commerce differs from human, pathetic economic
commerce, and has split off from it.
Scintillating a scenario though this is, its typology is somewhat banal
in that the old humanist opposition between human and technical has
been left intact. It reveals by hindsight that the Enlightenment operates
principally as an ideal of being able to determine itself by limiting its
own commercially led technological and scientific thrust, thought being
that agency that would harness it to the properly defective, the human,
the potential for memory that would keep thoughts selective dialecticity
alive. Memory must be kept just ahead of science; knowledge explodes
when technology surpasses it. Perfectibilarian thinking makes sense only
against the background of implicit imperfection.
But the human economy, though based on the desire to fulfil wishes
and return, and thus deeply moved by memory, as a fact will have
induced amnesia: that is sublimation. Wishes go underground. It is only
by forgetting that I can get on with living. While the antithesis human/
technical has been let lie, even though within it human shrinks to a
reference point rather than presenting substantial autotelic opposition,
the contrast between the pathos economy of human memory and the
Fukuyaman-iekian world has less resolution to it than at first sight
appears. The real time wherein I get on with my life is just as shallow
as the history-repellent time of post-histoire. The experiences I have in
it, the memories I accrue and the lacunae within or around them are
merely the code of ersatz subjectivity that can be translated back into
the general legend that is the structure of the psyche. To me it looks
like my history, but that is because the memory-economy I am in has
forged me in the only form it knows, that of subjectivity. The history
is tacit structure. That structure expresses itself in time because tem-
porality inheres in it as delay, as we have seen (the Oedipal phase), not
because of any claim over it made by historical phenomenology. The
pathos lies in the fact that the subjects who emerge into time from the
temporalisation of that structure are bound, because they are subjects
(because they now embody the energetic symbiosis of unconscious and
conscious), to interpret time as history, that is,, the opportunity for
memory, humanity, self-expression. And it is history, everything we
know by that name. Its just that its basis is rather more contorted than
usually granted, for its basis is time, which co-extends with it but which
originates in a structural vortex that has not yet recognised the possibil-
ity of an individual and subjective psyche since psyche only refers to
an implacable law. This is the law of deferral, competition or economy,

of which psychological subjectivity is merely an effect. We can say with

equal justification that there is real progress in history and that there is
not, that it is as equally life as death. We can also say that any subjective
assumption through memory of ones own experiences is just as deriva-
tive as in the future-state, for an expropriative, generalising, structural
power begets and conditions it.
Subjectively speaking, then, time is history with all its pathos of
commercial-psychological economism, the suffering of negotiation,
fortune. Or, subjectivity is the misprision that time is absorbed by
history in toto, similar to Paul de Mans presentation of subjectivity as
what mistakes linguistic, tropological time for the anthropomorphism of
history or genetic time (an overestimation of the object, even, to adapt
Freuds notation for love). And because memory belongs in with this
primary subjectal illusion, thought opens up as well. As sceptical appre-
hension (our working definition), thought depends on memory as upon
its own predicate. For scepticism is not innocence, and relies on knowing
something already. One cannot think sceptically without a degree of
memory; equally, memory is a constitutive feature of subjectivity. So
thought and subjectivity go hand and hand, just as thought fades away
in the subject-less realm of the future-state. Can one imagine a theory
of thought, an epistemology, that was not at the same time a formula of
the subject?
In other words, the psychoanalytic subject certainly does think, it
thinks because it is a subject, and it thinks as a subject, which is to say in
relation to its own past no matter how recent or remote: we should say
in relation to itself as related to a particular anteriority taken for its own.
There is always some minimal attestation of experience, and a minimal
part of thinking is its echo. In this way, through thought-as-memory,
the subject perceives itself as individual or having some considerable
insularity, living as it does in the channel of its own experience. Even
though it is wrong to do so from a structural point of view, the subject
is bound to believe in its own individuality, its subjectivity, and think-
ing primarily is the form of this constitutive belief. The subject exists
as a limit; its subjectivity implies experience as limited to a particular
form, finite experience. We would have no conception of time if we
did not also have that of finitude; from a psychoanalytic viewpoint this
finitude describes the contours of a private history of desire, memory
as it is retained regulatively within the economy of negotiation, that is
bargaining for what we want.
We have now encroached again on the ground whereon thinking and
death hold each other in relation. Must not thinking as the subjects
experience of its own limit be an intimation of mortality? Well, no:
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64 Death-Drive
there is no reason to associate the limitation to subjectivity with the

limitation of the subject. On the other hand, the continuous anteriority
that shadows all thinking restrains the latter to a necessary regression or
recidivism, to use Adornos word again, and for Freud regressiveness
is the very meaning of death the return to a simple state. Death comes
first, it pre-dates life. For mortals, the absolute past or past before
the past is what lies ahead. The movement of life is archaeological,
or archaeo-teleo-logical to be precise. Since this is also the movement
of psychoanalysis as a technique whose goal is the retrieval of the lost
archic code (of the psyche), there is some justification for saying that
in theorising the death-drive psychoanalysis is theorising itself, and
through what it itself would call an identification of some kind. For the
subject this movement backwards involves a transition from the finitude
of its own subjectivity back to infinity, its dissolution or rather its gen-
eralisation, the cessation of respect for its speciality. Its finitude means
that it will not always be finite, or that its finitude will be finished. And
by a peculiarly metacritical logic, this means in turn that the subject
will become thinkable again to psychoanalysis, as a phenomenon with
attributes susceptible of generalisation. Psychoanalysis can think about
the subject only on condition that it be a subject that will die like all
others. Mortality would be the subjects promise to leave its specificity
behind, to return into the archaeological general origin, and it is on the
basis of this promise that psychoanalysis can think the subject.
How do these things tie up with the notion we began with, of thinking
as risk-averse repetition? In the economy it participates in (there can be
no non-participation), the subject will have occasionally to take risks to
get what it wants, and for no other reason than that it is in an economy:
for economy implies some diminution of personal control and therefore
the presence of chance. Economy is a risk environment for the subject.
Up to a point such an economy could be contrasted with the achieved
economy of Fukuyama in which the anxieties of risk are allayed simply
because the economy provides which, again, barely makes it an
economy at all, if economy is, as surely it must be, a form which can
always fail to provide. Beyond such a point, however, the two types
of economy merge again where psychoanalytic subjects can be seen to
derive from quite anonymous principles of temporal delay (derived in
their turn from the general premise of wish-fulfilment).
Absolute inertia is not an option for the subject which exists only
as an economic form. Some life, some risk, some calculation is incum-
bent upon it. Some thought as the retention of desire must fill at least
a part of it, and such thought forms the link with the death which the
subject harps back to. Thought necessarily suggests living calculation,

the appraisal of opportunity, the estimation of values, all as forms of

life it has its origin in economics (as the epigraph from Nietzsche
proposes). But this living risk environment, that of the (by definition)
never omniscient subject, is at once nothing but a tension with the death
it has pulled away from in order to return to. Death is the realm of no
risk (no life). And life is quite literally tension, that is the apperception of
risk, which makes subjective living an essentially anxious activity this
is a statement quite proper to psychoanalysis throughout its develop-
ment as a theory. Whether or not we are compelled to repeat behaviour
neurotically later on in life, and whether or not our later thoughts toler-
ate being translated back into their infantile adumbrations, there exists
beforehand a prior link that puts thinking into a necessary relation with
death. That is the very meaning of subjectivity. Worse still, the memories
that subjects hold as earnests of their individuality themselves hail from
a deathly anonymity: the privacy of memory can in principle be deprived
from the subject and individualities traversed by a general law (a law of
genre, as Derrida would call it) which formally matches the concept of
death as I have entertained it in the course of this chapter.
Notes
1. The Dream-Work does not Think, trans. Mary Lydon, in The Lyotard
Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 1955.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
and R. J. Hollingdale (collected with Ecce Homo) (New York: Vintage
Books, 1969), 3rd essay, 17, p. 131.
3. See Chapter 6 below, A Harmless Suggestion, for elaboration of this
point.
4. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968),
pp. 21751.
5. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London:
Verso, 1978), 37, p. 61.
6. Ibid., p. 36.
7. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, with Max Horkheimer, trans. John Cumming
(London: Verso, 1979).
8. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
9. Ibid., pp. 989.
10. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990). As for the debate I refer specifically to Robert Newsoms A
Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ and
London: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
11. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), p. 99.

66 Death-Drive
12. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 175: I
fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased
in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the
nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For reli-
gion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot
but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and the love
of the world in all its branches.
13. From among many possible references I choose Derridas Donner la mort,
in Lthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pense du don (Colloque
de Royaumont, December 1990) (Paris: Mtaili-Transition, 1992),
pp. 11108.
14. Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London and New York: Verso,
1992), pp. 279375.
15. Ibid., p. 333.
16. Ibid., p. 332.
17. See chapter 1 of Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993).

Chapter 3
A Subject is Being Beaten
The half-hearted attempts at suicide that he kept making were not really
serious; it was not so much a desire for death death held for him neither
peace nor hope but rather the attempt, at moments of extreme terror or a
vacant stillness close to un-being, to restore his equilibrium through physical
pain. (Georg Bchner, Lenz)
If, according to Freud, the subject pursues its own death, or is steered
towards it by a drive for inertia, why not say suicide and masochism lie
at the heart of life? Is not suicide the telos of being human, and why
does Freud jib at the idea?
My title picks up on Freuds 1919 paper, A Child Is Being Beaten.
Freuds title in turn quotes a phrase one reiterated by several patients
in relating their beating-phantasies. These phantasies typically progress
through three phases, it being the second phase that counts:
This first phase of the beating-phantasy is . . . completely represented by the

phrase: My father is beating the child. I am betraying a great deal of what is
to be brought forward later when instead of this I say: My father is beating
the child whom I hate. Moreover, one may hesitate to say whether the char-
acteristics of a phantasy can yet be ascribed to this first step towards the
later beating-phantasy. It is perhaps rather a question of recollections of
events which have been witnessed, or of desires which have arisen on various
occasions. But these doubts are of no importance.
Profound transformations have taken place between this first phase and the
next. It is true that the person beating remains the same (that is, the father);
but the child who is beaten has been changed into another one and is now
invariably the child producing the phantasy. The phantasy is accompanied by
a high degree of pleasure, and has now acquired a significant content, with
the origin of which we shall be concerned later. Now, therefore, the wording
runs: I am being beaten by my father. It is of an unmistakably masochistic
character.
This second phase is the most important and the most momentous of all.
But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence.

68 Death-Drive
It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a

construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.
The third phase once more resembles the first . . .1
The second phase of the beating-phantasy presents clinically as maso-

chism. It may never have had a real existence, Freud says, but that in no
wise weakens its force. It may be more real for its very unavailability to
empirical observation, less negotiable, more indomitable, more decisive,
impossible to combat an ideal origin, held like an image in the air. The
power of phantasy may lie in just such insubstantiality. It carries the
power of structuring the psyche without ever being present as conscious.
How does it come into being, upon what materials does this
construction of analysis draw? Freud writes:
This being beaten is now a convergence of the sense of guilt and sexual love.
It is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation [with the
father], but also the regressive substitute for that relation, and from this latter
source it derives the libidinal excitation which is from this time forward
attached to it, and which finds its outlet in masturbatory acts. Here for the
first time we have the essence of masochism.2
This essence of masochism has two components: the sense of guilt and
sexual love. The sense of guilt acts upon libidinal energy as, however,
only one of two agencies capable of directing it. Sadism is the other: it
thrusts the same energy aggressively outward and, to the extent it may
be transformed by masochism, implying its precedence, constitutes a
comparatively regressive state. Freud says the transformation of sadism
into masochism appears to be due to the influence of the sense of guilt
which takes part in the act of repression, making of masochism the
relatively civilised phenomenon. The essence of masochism arises from
the less regressive of two modalities acting upon sexual love, with a
suggestion that even masochism will have first to pass through sadism
in order to transform it. In the case of beating-phantasies, less a forking
path taken by sexual love either sadism or masochism than a single
path beckons, the first steps upon which will always be sadistic even
if progress to masochism may later be made. I say later though one
cannot unproblematically assume a sequence in time for such events.
One encounters a theoretic as much as a genetic typology, and the
relationship between them here, as throughout the writings of Freud,
demands an analysis all its own.
With such theoretic information it should be possible to plot the lon-
gitude of masochism, as it were, against the latitude of suicide. Is suicide

A Subject is Being Beaten 69
on a continuum with masochism psychoanalytically understood? As

aggressive, perhaps mutant species of the genus self-relation, how do
suicide and masochism compare? There is no positive information I shall
advance of the type: suicide may be an accidental result of masochism
when it goes too far. Rather than offering sociological analysis, I want
to uncover conceptual foundations. Because if one multiplies suicide and
masochism together, at least using Freuds notations, one ends up with
neither an abnormality nor a perversity but even with the essence of
what it is to be a human being.
A year after the paper on beating-phantasies, Freud was to publish a
metapsychological account of pleasure at once very close and very far
from the spirit of A Child Is Being Beaten. Very close because again
pleasure manifests itself in its opposite form, something at first sight
destructive to the psyche, pain affording pleasure through masochism in
the earlier paper and through nothing less than death in the later; very
far precisely because the metapsychological and speculative atmos-
phere of the later paper makes it quite distinct from the more scientific
tenor of A Child is Being Beaten.
As we know from previous chapters, the notorious hypothesis of
the later paper, Beyond the Pleasure Principle,3 was that the self-
preservative sexual instincts are identical with the death instincts to the
extent the latter are, paradoxically, self-preservative too. A necessary,
if perhaps not sufficient, link exists between pleasure and death, with
Freud havering in the gap between this sufficiency and that necessity.
Death furnishes the goal of life in general, for life in general takes the
form of the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure results from the quietening
of tension to the point of surcease, the second self of death from which
theoretically and practically it cannot be isolated. Put at its most tau-
tologous: life, that is pleasure, seeks death, that is pleasure, that is life.
The tautology (or heterotautology, if we can attribute to this sameness-
in-difference a character akin to the play of identity in the dialectic of
Hegel) not only confounds distinctions, it also obliterates the notion of
seeking a goal, for no goal different from that which seeks it may be
discerned, be it pleasure, life or death. In almost Nietzschean fashion a
logic of identity gives way to a logic of force, desire, energy. A living
thing seeks death as an object no longer outside itself, and thus may
seek it only blindly, becoming itself or fulfilling its ontological mission
in the destruction of its ontic status, gathering itself into suicidal self-
coincidence. Suicide, which Freud does not name in the 1920 paper,
would be the general tendency of living things. And suicide, as what
serves pleasure at the risk of damage, would be no less formally related
to masochism than death to pleasure.

70 Death-Drive
However, suicide would annul once and for all the possibility of
seeking pleasure, that is death. If pleasure, death and life somehow
interfuse to the point of identity (if that is the word for it), and yet Freud
does not admit suicide alongside them, it may be because suicide would
make too explicit the effect of that interfusion, namely the collapse of
goal-seeking per se, to which we just referred. Suicide is that act which
abolishes the tendency that prompts it. This would undermine the whole
theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis, the founding tenet of which I take
to be wish-fulfilment (which is goal-seeking).
Another reason for Freuds non-connection of suicide and masochism
at this point may again be a matter of genre. That is to say, the account
of pleasure in masochism is genetic, while that of the pleasure inscribed
in the death instincts is structural. Even though Freud, we recall, has
written:
This second phase is the most important and the most momentous of all. But
we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is
never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a
construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.
nonetheless, the pleasure at issue coordinates with a real phase that

did not take place, as it were, in the patients life, whereas the pleasure
coeval with the death instincts pervades all of life considered as more or
less than, but in any case irreducible to, the phases articulating it.
Finally, Freud is by and large too committed to the value of subli-
mation to deem suicide much more than a regrettable failure of social
adaptation. Where masochism can be closely related to sublimation as
a civilised phenomenon, so to speak, one that bears guilt and therefore
social apprehension within it, suicide severs once and for all the social
relation to others.
Freud had in fact already provided an account of suicide, in a third
paper, Mourning and Melancholia (1917). And reading back from the
account of sadism and masochism in A Child is Being Beaten we can
see suicide in all its sadistic regressiveness, its failure of sociality. Freud
writes, It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to
suicide . . .. He goes on:
So immense is the egos self-love, which we have come to recognise as the

primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of
narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges at a threat
to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruc-
tion. We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of
suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses

against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of
forces can carry such a purpose through to execution.4
Up to now (the 1917 analysis of melancholia) suicide has been a

psychoanalytic riddle. But now:
The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if,
owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object if it
is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and
which represents the egos original reaction to objects in the external world.
Thus in regression from narcissistic object-choice the object has, it is true,
been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful than the ego
itself.5
Objects? We recall that sadism is the exteriorising, masochism the inte-

riorising, process. The suicidal person sadistically treats the self as an
object towards which aggression can be directed. In effect no self is
involved and suicide, strangely enough, is anything but a form of self-
relation. This has to be the case, for the ego would never destroy itself,
so immense is [its] self-love. What the suicide kills is not the self at all,
but an other, an object, a representation of the external world, played
by the self. Suicide, purely speaking, remains psychoanalytically impos-
sible. The act of self-murder is a regressive act of sadism performed mis-
takenly on the self, an act in which the bullet was meant for someone
else, someone in the past, but an act whereby a distorting anachronism
and moment of delegation puts to death the one who holds it.
But, one might ask, if the egos self-love really is so immense, how is
it the death instincts can ever vie with it, especially as such instincts are
not to be conflated with, and thus cannot profit from the aggression in,
the sadism fuelling suicide? The death instincts have no assignable place
in the genetic typology that passes through sadism, meaning they have
no skill in objectifying the self (on the contrary!) they cannot set it up
as a target; they belong to no phase, they constitute the psyche as such
and insofar as they do have this constitutive power, they of course can
rival the structurally embedded self-love of the ego. But what differenti-
ates the death borne by the death instincts and that borne by suicide?
If there is an answer to this question, it probably lies in the ambigu-
ity with which Freud describes the death instincts. For whereas suicide
entails destruction, the death instincts fixate on preservation on pre-
serving the psyche at zero level, composing death as an atavistic and
ultimately simple state. Two kinds of death present themselves.
Six years later, by the time of The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud has
amalgamated them. He does so by bringing both under the rubric of

72 Death-Drive
the superego. Able to draw upon the earlier work on melancholia, but
dispensing with the vocabulary of objects, Freud can synthesise an
answer to the following question: How is it that the superego mani-
fests itself essentially as a sense of guilt . . . and moreover develops such
extraordinary harshness and severity towards the ego? The answer:
If we turn to melancholia first, we find that the excessively strong super-ego

which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages against the ego with
merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism
available in the person concerned. Following our view of sadism, we should
say that the destructive component had entrenched itself in the super-ego and
turned against the ego. What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it
were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds
in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time
by the change round into mania.6
In this case, that of melancholia a case which often enough ends in

the death of the ego at the hands of the superego and which, therefore,
we may legitimately call suicidal the superego will have availed itself
of all the sadism to be had in the person concerned, despite the fact that
sadism is far less socially educated than masochism and so goes against
the grain to some extent of superegoic functioning. Being so sadistic,
the superego by definition will not, then, have advanced to masochism
(suicide is a sadistic and not a masochistic act its just that the sadism
has backfired on its perpetrator) and so must forfeit the pleasure maso-
chism brings. Yet this does not prevent Freud from squaring it off with
the essentially pleasure-driven death instincts. Indeed, the superego
is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, even though it must
have fought shy of pleasure (at least as produced by masochism) and be
finding the hedonism of the death instincts alien to it. Moreover, Freuds
metaphor of the pure culture of the death instinct sublates the differ-
ence between the deaths envisaged by suicide on the one hand and the
death instincts on the other.
There remains also the question of who kills whom in cases of suicide.
For Freud, an excessive superegoism leads to the death of the ego which
symbiotically kills off the superego with it. Insofar as the superego exists
in the realm of representations, its whoness must be fluid. The superego,
in theory the most socialised, civilised aspect of the psyche, nevertheless
may, under suicidal conditions, become flooded with the most primitive,
regressive, unregenerate feelings of all, those of sadism. This possibility,
that of the perversion of the superegoic function, thus reveals an ambi-
guity germane to the superego which Freud does not pursue, namely
whether the superegos faculty of discipline and control be an aggressive

or a socialising power, whether the two can be distinguished at all, or

whether socialisation begins, paradoxically, from a certain force of
aggression. To the extent the superego inhibits the ego, insisting that it
defer gratification of its wishes, it must appear inimical to it (sadistic); to
the extent it subsequently affords the ego pleasure in sublimated form,
that of being socialised, it appears to the ego as the least bad way of
getting what it wants, and in this aspect looks like an ally (masochistic).
The superego turns on this sado-masochistic ambivalence.
Either way, Freudian suicide stems from a superegoic energy; the ego
would never be capable of putting itself to death. But if we compare
Freud with Durkheim for a moment, we find an almost opposite account
in which suicide results from an egoism that signals an inadequate
penetration of social feeling into the individual. Of course Freuds and
Durkheims terms function differently, and ego means very different
things for each. For Durkheims egoic suicide, the social agency which
functions partly to relieve the individual of its claustral self-relatedness
has receded. Precisely the lack of social feeling leads to egoic suicide,
whereas for Freud the same result ensues, in superegoic form, from that
feelings excess. One could hardly have two accounts more perplexingly
at odds. Small wonder, though, given their very different agendas, and
given Durkheims assurance that no psychopathic state bears a regular
and indisputable relation to suicide.7 In a manner analogous to contem-
poraries in the philosophical field of phenomenology, Durkheim brack-
ets off the pathological-psychological that forms the constant focus of
Freuds investigations.
Indeed in his work on suicide as elsewhere Durkheim is at great pains
to police the border between sociology and any kind of psychology.8 He
writes, for example, that:
If mental disorders are of the decisive importance [in suicide] sometimes

attributed to them, their presence should be shown by characteristic effects,
even when social conditions tend to neutralise them; and, inversely, the latter
should be unable to appear when individual conditions contradict them. The
following facts show that the opposite is the rule. [There follow several pages
of facts and tables.]9
We would be misled, however, in perceiving a straightforward antipathy

between psychoanalysis and sociology in general, or between theories
of suicide in particular. One may question whether one is comparing
like with like, or even the familiar Durkheim with the familiar Freud,
the rub being that while Durkheim imperturbably adduces sociological
as opposed to individualistic explanations of suicide, he remains the
more psychological in his definitions. For, as we shall see in a moment,

74 Death-Drive
suicide appears to result from a preponderance of individual psychology

over its own socialisation (and thus carries a threat to sociology per se),
while Freud operates more sociologically than he appears. My reason
for saying this is, of course, that Freuds account of suicide, at least in
The Ego and the Id, is not an account of suicide at all but of murder.
What puts the subject to death is the superego operating as representa-
tive of society in the tripartite subject. A subject is being beaten in
that autonomous subjectivity is being beaten out of it. Egoistic suicide
Durkheims category can make no sense to psychoanalysis, for the
ego is that which wants the best for itself (so immense is its self-love).
And on the other hand, Durkheims logic is far more Freudian than it
seems: left to its own devices, the subject or individual will tend toward
dissolution, finding no goal outside itself through which to ventilate its
dangerously onanistic self-relation. It is as if to correct the drift toward
self-destruction one might call it by way of provocation the death
instincts that Durkheims work springs up. The book Suicide as it were
admits this prior tendency and, to embrace Freudian terms myself for a
moment, its scientific rigour would constitute the symptom of an anxiety
provoked by that tendencys existence.
In other words, the stark contrast between Freud and Durkheim
gets fuzzy on closer inspection. For a start a great deal of indecision
and revision on Freuds part confronts us as a tension between an
account of masochism on the one hand, the death instincts on the
other and suicide as that gravitational field pulling them together. The
pull has strengthened enough by the time of The Ego and the Id to
hook suicide and masochism to the tautological chain of life, death
and pleasure that we mentioned above. Ad absurdam then: life, that is
pleasure, seeks death, that is pleasure, that is masochism, that is suicide,
that is death, that is pleasure, that is life . . . Or so it seems: there is
one thing capable of arresting the levelling of terms and of protect-
ing the notion of goal-seeking by maintaining distance between them,
and that is the tripartite structure of the subject itself. It is because the
subject comprises id, ego and superego precisely as intra-relational or
dynamic that there can be intra-relationality between the terms of the
chain rather than a meltdown of them. So, for example, the superego
as destroyer or Mars must remain meaningfully distinct from the ego
as eudemonist or Venus; relation exists between these forces if not a
clean table of psychic identities. This throws up the question, however,
of whether the Freudian subject so slipshod a term can be meas-
ured against the Durkheimian individual, for the former comprehends
both the individual and the social. Its sociality inheres more necessar-
ily and inalienably in it (as superego) than is the case for Durkheim

who, if he fears a splitting off of the two, individual and society, might
do so because he posits them a priori as mutually foreign. For all the
sociological aetiology Durkheim produces to explain suicide, a causal
explanation it remains of the social causes creating an individuals
events, so to speak (and even though there may be no content to the
individual before or outside of such causes) and thus does not disturb
this primary dualism of individual and society.
All of which raises the question of whether Durkheim is talking about
suicide any more than is Freud or whether, rather, another kind of dis-
placed murder has presented itself. Durkheims suicidal individual will
have strayed onto the site where those social pressures likely to issue in
suicide converge, little more than the hapless occupant of that point on
the social network where such pressures become intense and exigent. The
individual merely expresses, acts as mere conductor of, that peculiarly
catatonic nodal energy which most societies will have at some point on
their causal grid. Suicide would be like getting run over at a crossroads
of these causes, with society itself at the wheel. Such blackspots can in
principle be identified this ought to be within the remit of sociology
insofar as the theoretical conclusions it draws from empirical data allow
for a certain amount of prediction though those pedestrians passing
through them may be the least apprised of them (while the sociologist
could ably flag them). Which is to say that the Durkheimian project of
depriving the individual of individualism turns his notion of suicide into
one of collective murder, or perhaps the unlawful killing prominent in
later years in British law.
Though having had its subjective intentionality sponged from it in
this fashion, the Durkheimian individual would remain an individual
literally speaking indivisible by, though accommodating of, society. It
may as we mentioned have no content other than that lent it by its social
environment, but formally it remains distinct. This leaves the dualism
intact. After all, the individual must be retained methodologically as a
fixed screen for receiving mixed social information.
And in fact there is a sense in which this individual will after all have
reclaimed some independent individualism, and it is the same as that in
which collective murder reverts to suicide once more. What I am refer-
ring to is the moment of actual suicide, the instant of pure self-relation
in the act of self-murder, a moment which will not in itself have been
encroached upon by the company of causes pressing toward it. There
comes a point at which the act takes over from the potential. In this
instant the individual achieves autonomy even as both are annihilated.
This would also be the theoretic point where sociology itself must desist,
the individual absconding into a quite other level, that of pure act, if

76 Death-Drive
it can be put like this. In this respect suicide heralds both the life and
the death of sociology: the life, as the ideal sociological datum, that
phenomenon through which sociology can brilliantly display its raison
dtre; the death, as pointing up the limit of sociological method, in the
transition from cause to act.
Another way of putting this, and of taking the discussion up by way
of conclusion to a metacritical level, is to say that sociology allows
for a fundamentally scientific construal of the individual in a way that
psychoanalysis cannot. The individual can be detached from society
for observation; the dualism between the two serves a classically scien-
tific agenda. In psychoanalysis, by contrast, an essential indeterminacy
affects that relation subjective representation, identification, substi-
tution, transference, all inhere irreducibly in the social sphere in which
individuals move and from which, therefore, they have no exit into dis-
crete individuality. Suicide provides an excellent example of how each
discipline deploys a very different modus operandi.
If this is right, that it is formatted more by the undecidable relays of
transference than by the attributions of (social) identity, the Freudian
subject that emerges will by default frustrate the sociology which, as
Foucault says, appends to the discursive apparatus that perceives the
human being as related in a fundamentally analytic way to the world.
According to Foucault, the discourse of sociology in the late nineteenth
century partakes of that general yet largely inscrutable organisation
of ideological drives which render the human being in such a way as
to make it, like the suicide it may be prone to, an ideal sociological
phenomenon. While sociology situates the human above all in relation
to institutions, it effectively colludes with, or at least mimics, an insti-
tution which it might have considered just one object of study among
others, and an object to which Foucault of course devotes a famous
study namely, the prison. Sociology is as much a discursive institution
as the prison in that both are united by the perception of the human as
institutionally accountable. Sociology and the prison, inter alia, govern
that zone of figuration populated by what Foucault calls docile bodies.
These twin panoptic institutions correspond to a new figuration of the
body, of the human being as the body, where in becoming the target
for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to new forms of
knowledge:
It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipu-

lated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful
training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that
very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are
beginning to emerge.10

This body is redefined in its docility towards being put under surveil-
lance, its yieldingness to techniques of calculation and to the taxonomic
identification of its being-in-the-world as social function. It may be
disciplined, where discipline provides at once a means for its control
and, to the extent that the disciplined subject cuts a profile of combined
regularity and visibility, a means of knowing it in a more perspicuously
scientific manner. Indeed, knowledge and power indissociably merge.
Now, the terms Foucault uses in his title, Discipline and Punish as the
English has it, or Surveiller et punir in the French, are actually echoes,
witting or not, of a phrase that appears in a fourth essay of Freuds, enti-
tled The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924). To put it in context,
I cite the bulk of the paragraph where it appears; Freud is speaking once
more about the three agencies:
We have said that the function of the ego is to unite and to reconcile the
claims of the three agencies which it serves; and we may add that in doing so
it also possesses in the super-ego a model which it can strive to follow. For
this super-ego is as much a representative of the id as of the external world.
It came into being through the introjection into the ego of the first objects of
the ids libidinal impulses namely, the two parents. In this process the rela-
tion to those objects was desexualised; it was diverted from its direct sexual
aims. Only in this way was it possible for the Oedipus complex to be sur-
mounted. The super-ego retained essential features of the introjected persons
their strength, their severity, their inclination to supervise and punish. [my
italics]11
Freud goes on to say that the super-ego the conscience at work in the
ego may then become harsh, cruel and inexorable against the ego which
is in its charge and one is back again on the path to masochism.
We have no way of knowing in which language Foucault must have
read Freuds essay, and in any case it is not my intention to establish a
source. The point is that masochism, which had been fading from our
analysis, once again enters the frame, and with it the general question
of sexuality, but now in relation to (scientific) knowledge. As agents
of surveillance and control, discursively speaking, sociology and the
prison function superegoically within or upon the subject, represent-
ing perhaps archaic images of the parents taken from the id. These
institutions coincide radically with certain psychic functions of the
subject experiencing them, and thus one cannot attribute to them a free-
standing reality or objectivity. Going from this hypothesis, the experi-
ence of prison for the prisoner will vary only according to the amount of
guilt felt in being there. The prisoner who feels no guilt will experience
prison discipline as simple hostility (sadism). The guilt-feeling, maso-
chistic prisoner a more complex case would also be one for whom

78 Death-Drive
no psychic difference exists between superego and prison, but for whom
a certain return of pleasure will be assured along with the sense of guilt.
Implicit in both cases is the fact that the prison matches the ambiguous
role of the superego in general, combining as it does an effort at sociali-
sation with its functions of punishment and containment. Its affect will
be either sadistic or masochistic according to the prisoner in question.
The sociology-prison itself cares little, however, for the forcefield of
pulsional drives in which its objects of control (prisoners, sociological
subjects or individuals) are deployed. It surveys them disinterestedly,
caring only for the quanta of knowledge derivable from them. For
this, as Foucault was hinting a moment ago, is how power creates itself
not through an affective or rhetorical or transitive exertion of force
upon its subjects, not through a psychological ruse (say of treating one
person sadistically or conning another into masochistic complicity with
itself), not through any sensuous experience of hierarchy but through
the sheer vitreous availability to itself of knowledge about what is
not itself. True, the by-product of such knowledge may be precisely
such affective relations of power as those just listed, but this is not the
route through which power establishes itself. Power establishes itself
through knowledge, not through the phenomenology, so to speak, the
dramaturgy even, of power. But subjectively speaking, at ground level,
the experience of being known must be one of either sadism or maso-
chism. An implicit link connects knowledge to this sado-masochistic
fulcrum.
To generalise from Foucault, the form of social history as a whole
from roughly the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century must be
one of a pervasive sado-masochism, given the dominance of superegoic
forms which discipline, punish, survey, control and thus know. Now
it is a case not of the level at which sado-masochism occurs, but of its
relative prominence, which varies historically. The knowledge afforded
at these historical junctures would be the pay-off too for the sado-
masochistic subject whose proximity to the institution would amount
to proximity to its own superego. That is to say, the panopticism of
which Foucault speaks must in principle render the persons surveyed
transparent to themselves too and not just to the watchmen. A kind of
infinite paranoia prevails.
Not that this leads to any gain in, or content for, self-reflection.
In Freud it matters little whether or not knowledge is added to the
sado-masochistic experience the only criterion which truly concerns
the Freudian subject is its own pleasure (and it is thus in its interests
to transmute sadism into masochism). But then, even in Foucault it is
not certain that knowledge (conjoined with power) has any epistemic

substance to it. What is known about the subject, either by that subject
or by the institutions from time to time administrating it, is known only
at the sociological level, that is in terms of the distribution of its body
in space and time. That is what knowledge has become police intel-
ligence, in effect. Ironically, the episteme that it represents has nothing
epistemological about it. And after all, the Foucauldian subject will
know, quite as clearly as the institutional governors, where it is due
and at what time. Its self-knowledge is represented entirely by its time-
table. The geography of its movements, and no psychological, ontologi-
cal or other information, is enough to satisfy the conditions of knowing
it. In fact knowledge appears all the more powerful for such asceticism
in a sense it has become a pure science.
And if knowledge in Foucault finds its epistemic interior hollowed
out and filled instead with police intelligence, the same fate befalls
sexuality. This is made quite clear in a discussion by Foucault towards
the end of the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality. The
discussion has in fact been about suicide, and with unmissable allusion
to Durkheim:
Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its
dominion; death is powers limit, the moment that escapes it [as suicide
escapes sociology]; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the
most private. It is not surprising that suicide once a crime, since it was a
way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one
here below or the Lord above, had the right to exercise became, in the
course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the
sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right
to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over
life. This determination to die, strange and yet so persistent and constant in
its manifestations, and consequently so difficult to explain as being due to
particular circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first astonish-
ments of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of
administering life.12
This secret of suicide marked the dark limit of the otherwise diapha-
nous polis, and there is a sovereignty in sociology as it brings the secret
to light. Sovereignty is that power of exposure over private secrets, the
feudalistic droit de seigneur over interiority and its pathos. Privacy is
what must be obliterated, which is precisely why the subject comes to
be constructed without any content from which it could generate self-
consciousness. Essentially this means that all subjectivity is perform-
ance; nothing remains in the shadows. And this is also where sexuality
comes in.
In the course of the next paragraph, and with the same ideational

80 Death-Drive
momentum, as it were, Foucault will assimilate sexuality to this typol-

ogy of the great technology of power in the nineteenth century. For like
suicide, sexuality reduces to a locus of exertion for that great technology
busy with, in Foucaults post-Marxist terms, the controlled insertion
of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. It is not that sexuality
is repressed, despite appearances, but on the contrary that it is actively
produced in the service of that technology, as both its medium and its
object (in so far as these terms remain useful).
This leads to an equally complete levelling of terms as in Freud.
Sexuality and suicide merge as forms of subjectivity that are all the
more ideologically piquant for being so acutely subjective, as it were.
The technology of power (another form of the sociology-prison)
recognises no difference between sexuality and suicide, for they afford
the same possibility of that technologys own exercise. They become
abetting functions of that power, and like knowledge but unlike
technology, crucially bear no content that resembles their essence.
Alternatively, the essence of sexuality is not sexual, of suicide is not
suicidal. Or at least whatever essence they have has become irrelevant,
the ideological dimension in which they exist having rendered essences
obsolete while foregrounding function. At most both are facets of the
essence of technology, which is to remake the world according to its
own powers, like a vast, narcissistic ideological machine that nonethe-
less has no self. Diverse essences are sucked into this technology and
then reproduced as moments of its power though this exists nowhere
outside those moments, but is purely kinetic.
One could go further and say as a final speculation to end on that
the technology of power even stands in a relationship of analogy with
wish-fulfilment in psychoanalysis, in that both are master terms capable
of treating the objects under their jurisdiction indifferently. Every
object of experience is potential pleasure in Freud, potential knowledge
(power) in Foucault, every phenomenon submitted to a dominating
force, the will to knowledge or the will to pleasure, that recognises them
as equally valid aspects of its own power of cohesion, where the equal
value they share overrides their factual distinctness. Which in turn might
mean that the essential mastery, the real domination or control we are
dealing with in Freud, Foucault and Durkheim for that matter is that of
their own mastery over their own work. Each is a founder of discourse,
to use Foucaults own description of Freud. And each, in their totalis-
ing ways, deploys master terms holding in docile abeyance the body of
thought and terminology beneath them. What they discipline and survey
is the field of knowledge itself, the content of their work allegorising its

form. That, possibly, is the impurity or contamination to be confronted,

though it is questionable that it could ever be definitively known or
controlled.
Notes
1. SE, XVII, p. 185.
2. Ibid., p. 189.
3. Collected in SE, XVIII.
4. SE, XIV, p. 252.
5. Ibid., p. 252.
6. SE, XIX, p. 53.
7. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding
and George Simpson (London: Routledge, 1952) [hereafter referred to as
Suicide], p. 81.
8. It is with Durkheims discussion of egoic as opposed to altruistic and
anomic suicide that we are concerned.
9. Suicide, p. 70.
10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 155.
11. SE, XIX, p. 167.
12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 1389.

Chapter 4
White Over Red
O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
(William Blake, The Sick Rose)
Try as I might, I cannot make a mistake. Everything I do no matter

how stupid, how socially inept, how askew from even my own designs
will be just right. I cannot fail.
Under what circumstances could one make such a claim?
Under the circumstances of psychoanalytic theory, thats how. As long
as the I refers to a psychoanalytic subject, the claim has perfect validity.
Freuds famous work on parapraxes slips of the tongue and the like
paradoxically implies the psyche never goes wrong. Chapter ten of The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life is entitled Errors. Paragraphs two
and three read, in Stracheys translation, as follows:
In my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) I was responsible for a number of
falsifications which I was astonished to discover after the book was pub-
lished. They concern historical points and, in general, points of fact. After
closer examination I found that they did not owe their origin to my igno-
rance, but are traceable to errors of memory which analysis is able to explain.
On page 266 (of the first edition) . . . I refer to the town of Marburg a name
also found in Styria as Schillers birthplace. The error occurs in the analysis
of a dream which I had during a journey by night and and [sic] from which I
was awoken by the guard calling out the name of Marburg station. In the
content of the dream someone asked a question about a book by Schiller. In
fact Schiller was not born at the university town of Marburg but at Marbach
in Swabia. Moreover I can assert that I have always known this.1

White Over Red 83
One can perhaps detect in this some professional embarrassment,

a scholars banal mistake dressed up as an analytic curio and then
betrayed again with the pompous defence, Moreover I can assert that
I have always known this. Noteworthy also is the fact that the text
quoted, on errors, itself contains a typographic error, with an extra and
added after during a journey by night and.2
On the next page, Freud puts forward his standard explanation of
this and the other errors cited, affirming that where an error makes its
appearance a repression lies behind it or more correctly, an insincer-
ity, a distortion, which is ultimately rooted in repressed material. That
repressed material makes up the Unconscious. It had to be repressed
because it contained wishes of a libidinal nature that in the open would
not have been tolerated. When fragments of such intolerable material do
slip out, they meet depending how much they disguise themselves in
the process of presentation the actual disapprobation the fear of which
triggered their original repression.
But despite their baleful reception that condemns them as erroneous
or disgraceful, these apparently random emissions accomplish a psychic
truth. An error has indeed been committed but, as it happens, is errone-
ous from a certain perspective only. Psychically speaking, the error was
right, the right thing to say, the right thing to write. And it is indeed as if
Freud is saying to us on these pages, Look, I was right!, I was wrong,
but I was right! For the psyche has performed its function swimmingly.
It repressed something unacceptable, then dropped its guard, then out
came exactly what it had yearned to say. I wanted to say Marburg!,
exclaims the psyche, and I got to say it!
What an upside to everyday life. Either I am right in the normative
sense, or I am wrong but getting a psychical hit from my errors. But
of course more middle ground exists. Owing to its ability for disguise,
repressed material need not limit itself to cameo appearances in flagrant
but isolated slips like these; as long as it wears the right social costume it
can pass for normal for whole stretches of time which means it merges
with the socially palatable form of self-gratification Freud calls subli-
mation. Marburg may have been an error, but its not so far off from
Marbach and, for all Freuds donnish awkwardness, it hardly smacks
of transgression not to mention that its quite possible Marburg itself
disguises, or adjusts upwards as it were, an error more treacherous. A
psychoanalytic bridge of sorts appears before us, spanning from truth
to error in the following order:
1. I write Marbach correctly, free from interference by my repressed

material.

84 Death-Drive
2. I write Marbach correctly, but actually Marbach is my repressed

material in perfect disguise (model sublimation).
3. I write Marburg, which is Marbach contaminated by my repressed
material. It is therefore both academically incorrect and psychically
correct, yet not so academically incorrect as to be unrecognisable
(inept sublimation). This is what happens in Freuds text.
4. As in (3), but the error is far worse than it seems, the repressed mate-
rial more vicious. In this case Marburg is working as a kind of
dummy error (mock-inept sublimation). This point on the bridge
could be placed elsewhere, on account of its trickery.
5. I write *******, a grotesque and mortifying error (failed
sublimation).
6. I write Marbach correctly, nor is any other error discernible in my
text to indicate a visit from the repressed material. However, the lack
of error itself appears symptomatic. Alternatively, the repressed
material now runs in the form, rather than the content, of what I
write in the rhythm, the pauses, even the choice of genre.
7. I write and write, my writing perhaps abounding in a variety of all
the above types of truth and error, but with a substantial quantum
perhaps all the rest of my repressed material never showing
through in any form, no matter how distorted or displaced.
8. I do not write, but all the above possibilities displace onto other
activities.
9. All my repressed material remains hermetically sealed, never to see
the light of day.
No doubt we could divide the points still further, though of them the
first stands out. It sits precariously atop the others, for the sheer pos-
sibility of number two (model sublimation) undermines it and it has
only to be possible for radical, constitutive uncertainty to seed. No one
can prove for sure whether Marbach represents the conscious truth
or a deft interloper from the Unconscious. And if Marbach cannot be
proved, its condition may be generalised to include why not? all indi-
vidual expression, spoken, written, gestural and otherwise. It need only
be structurally possible for repressed material to mimic all functional,
truthful, normal, conscious expression, for this crisis of indecision to
spark off.
Equally unnerving, but from a different angle, is the overall infal-
libility of the psychic system, for the Unconscious looks incapable of
launching anything but perfect errors. Whatever the Unconscious ends
up expleting, even where truly offensive (point (5) above), it neither
loses its line out to it nor, coevally, refuses the pleasurable vibrations

White Over Red 85
transmitted back. The psyche constitutes a system indeed. The mistakes

it makes are its mistakes, tethered on the wish-telegraph and always
representing faithfully, if polymorphously and perversely, the material
repressed. The shapes may change but they remain cut-outs, so to speak,
from the Unconsciouss black paper.
Which raises a decisive question: what if Marburg were not Freuds
error? What if the signal had gone down somewhere between Freuds
own repression into the Unconscious of some inexcusable material and
the slip of the pen that produces not Marbach but Marburg instead?
Freudian theory of course would rule that out as inadmissible, and for
axiomatic reasons that include the psyches systemic unity. Without it,
slips and other symptoms become untraceable scintillas of ever-potential
meaning, heaped like jigsaw pieces that dont relate to pictures. For
what really matters about Marburg and Marbach is that each shows a
different side of the same psychic coin, and the unshakeable monology
in this underpins the theory of psychoanalysis from end to end. Free
association, for example, a praxis devoted to demonstrating the essen-
tial continuity of apparently discontinuous elements, would, without
that centripetal pull of the singular psyche, degenerate into hopeless
chaos. Childhood stories would become unattributable in principle, thus
forcing their reclassification as fictitious baubles. The whole Freudian
edifice, in truth, would begin to crack. Even the theory of fantasy, which
flashes on elements extraneous to the individual psyche, fails to provide
indemnity. For in fantasy the psyche shows it can collect any foreign
disjecta into the diorama of its own wishes, taking them on from other
people or elsewhere and exhibiting them as icons of its own ultimate
oneness. Nor is it just the individual psyche that benefits after all, it is
that unity of a given psyche that guarantees the analytic and interpreta-
tive relation to it. With what would psychoanalytic technique be in rela-
tion if its object, the individual psyche, were disaggregated from its core
and in its very principle? We shall come back to this in a minute.
So the psyche is always right, but on condition that it is a psyche.
Perhaps the stakes are not so great after all. But when in later writing
Freud breaches further to argue that even death may be right for the
psyche, matters become more grave. What the theory of the death-drive
paralogically lays out is that death, far from marking a fatal error in
the life of the psyche, actually supports and completes it it even brings
pleasure. In this sense death is the greatest slip of all. It is as if the psyche
blurts out death! when life! was the thing to say; despite and because
of the anathema it carries, doing so cashes in a pleasure deferred.
Dramatically outbidding the mistakes it might make in slips of tongue
or pen, the psyche effectively gambles its own existence. It should have

86 Death-Drive
said life, but the uncontainable anticipation of pleasure coursing through

it made it substitute death instead. (One of the many complications here
lies in that because both life and death give it pleasure, the psyche
cannot always distinguish the two. But nor does it need to. As far as the
psyche is concerned, pleasure the fulfilment of wishes matters more
than either life or death which have value only as media for pleasur-
able returns. In this sense, saying life equates to saying death, which
now makes life the ultimate slip. Life is but the camouflage of death,
and indeed of itself, in that life really means my pleasure. Further
permutations could follow.) The fundamental point is that what shows
up as a fatal error of the psyche, when it speaks death instead of life,
in fact signals a moment of psychic vitality and pleasure. Freuds theory
of the death-drive, in other words, continues the logic of parapraxes,
whereby material that appears to contravene social or rational norms,
and so threaten the status of the very psyche responsible, functions on
the contrary to sustain and gratify that psyche. For we are indeed within
a psychical logic, a psychical analysis. The notion of a deathly perfect
error requires careful separation, then, from its rationalist look-alikes,
which I shall spend a moment on.
The first of these must be the notion of death as a condition of life.
One could argue that being a condition of life, death already was a
perfect error in some sense. Qua conditional, death ushers in a rightness
to the decease of life it perpetrates, a contractual completeness, and so
amounts to a perfect error in its own right . . . Arguing so may be valid,
but it departs from Freudian psycho-logic or psychoanalysis. The death-
drive considered as a drive at least empties of meaning once death
is installed as lifes condition, for a condition need not, indeed cannot,
be driven towards. Crudely put, if we are to die anyway, what need a
death-drive? From this viewpoint, the two arguments clash irreconcil-
ably. Either death is the condition of life, in which case a death-drive is
pointless, or, inversely, the death-drive is at large, suggesting de facto
that death cannot be a condition.
On the heels of this, perhaps a sub-point of it, comes the notion of
mortality which also, as a built-in error, that is, a built-in error, could
be construed as planned or right in some way. According to the rule
of mortality, life was set to go wrong to the point of not going any
more at all. Life was set for death, programmed for it. But where does
that leave the psyche? What is the difference between mortality and psy-
choanalytic death? Was this psyche bound to die? Was the slip inevita-
ble and if so could it legitimately have been a slip? Two broad answers
offer themselves. Although Freudian slips must always be right, they
need not always be. Retaining the title to repress in principle everything

White Over Red 87
asked to, repression simply isnt working if slips have become inevita-
ble. The possibility of the inevitable slip thus menaces the very principle
of repression which is nothing less than the condition of possibility
of the Unconscious (without repression, the Unconscious would not,
could not, have formed). And yet one thing alone will never bow to
repression, one slip that everyone makes: its name is death, and no one
has might enough to deny themselves its gratifying necessity. Peculiarly,
this implies deaths pureness from unconscious or repressed residues,
despite the depth of its provenance: non-repressible, not subject to being
plunged into this or that Unconscious, death takes on a strangely surface
character. Which implies in turn that death cannot slip, for it has no
unconscious prison to slip from. Thus far, it seems that psychoanalytic
death rather resembles built-in mortality after all. Unlike common or
garden slips, death just had to be there is no getting around it, and
if the psychoanalytic psyche manages to express it in a slip-like a
pleasure-yielding manner, its expression does anything but constitute
a daring display of repressed material, for death had not been, could not
have been, repressed. After all, one cannot bring to light what was not
hidden (to use Freuds language of the Uncanny).3 And yet. The evidence
doesnt quite stack high enough to prove that psychoanalytic death was
built in la mortality. Death may be non-repressible and necessary to
that extent, but its pleasure-giving properties invite the psyche to inter-
pret and reposit it, precisely and perfidiously, as the exact opposite. In
its wish-saturated stupidity, the psyche will read death, because it sensed
some pleasure in it, as non-necessary, ergo an occupant of the realm of
free will, with all appropriate jouissance radiating. So long as whatever
it is provides the pleasure the psyche so indefatigably chases, the psyche
will not recognise it as necessary the necessary leaves no room, by
definition, for freedom or choice or will or pleasure. Psychically, there-
fore, death may be experienced as avoidable, which in turn allows the
possibility of the psyche pursuing, nay driving towards, it. At bottom,
you can pursue only what you might miss. And to be able to pursue the
pleasure in death, the psyche will, even if it has been built in, jettison
death so that it can then refind it on its own terms.
Was the psyche programmed to die, as if mortal in the conventional
sense? In other words, does it obey time in the same way, or at all? For
when we observe that we are mortal we tacitly make a claim about time
whose forward march assures the inevitability of death. Again this
may do for a rationalist mindset, but as we have just seen, its pleasur-
able quality leads the psyche, erroneously no doubt, to sort death into a
different category, from inevitable to evitable. Once there, death can put
on the temporal vestments that go with it, principal among which will

88 Death-Drive
be the aleatory, the sudden, the inadvertent, the disruptive and the dis-
junctive. To the psyche, the last thing death looks like is the terminus of
an inexorable time-bound processus. So we circle back: death becomes
a slip again, the psyche reorients it as pleasurable accident rather than
ineluctable tragedy.
Finally, in separating psychoanalytic from rationalist versions of
death, its important to distinguish two kinds of organicism: on the one
hand, an organic or natural sense of death as the limit of lifes ripeness;
on the other, the instinctual aspects of Freudian metapsychology.
Although Freud postulates a state of organic inertia as the destination
of life, that state will be one that the psyche has returned to rather than
encroached upon in that moment of conjoint fulfilment and dereliction
we know as death. The psyche has not gained a final frontier so much as
shrunk back to an earlier state of things, as we know Freud puts it in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle.4 The ripeness becomes one of utter pre-
cocity. But it is still a ripeness and a rightness of sorts, and death is not
just a slip but also a masterful, atavistic summation a perfect error.
Our original question, however, awaits an answer, namely what if
Marburg were not Freuds error? What if the error were not so innocent
and came to jeopardise the systemic and unitary nature of the psyche that
we noted? Already we have a hint. We were saying that death, strictly
speaking, escapes all repression. Though the psyche may trope it out dif-
ferently, image it as errant pleasure and to this extent repress it, death
will enjoy immunity from repression proper, in the shape of its absolute
necessity; it may be repressed with a small r in this psychopoetic way,
but never will it undergo full-blown Repression, for unless something
lets itself in principle be repressed in perpetuity, never coming to light,
it cannot be said to be subject to repression at all, and this is not the
case for oh-so-necessary death. Death will out in the end. On this view,
it will never belong to a psyche, never stoop within its orbit. A given
psyche may weakly repress it, mock-repress it, but, like moonlight inside
a room, death will only reflectedly allow projections of itself into the
psyche. But does death in any way split the psychic atom apart? These
benign reflections and poetic indulgences do little to trouble the psyches
wholeness, but the story doesnt end there. Yes, the psyche does use
death, in a psychoanalytic sense it even cathects it and to do so it
has first to channel death back towards itself in a gesture that must both
locate and therefore unify that psyche. So far, so safe for the psyche. But
in this false repression, this shadow-incorporation, the psyche has taken
in something quite toxic. Quite apart from the fact that the psyche has
played at its own deletion (this is death, after all), it has also taken in a
part larger than its whole. Along with its pleasurable imagery of death,

White Over Red 89
the psyche has ingested a necessity, and necessity is the nemesis of all
private or inner space, necessity is structurally exterior. By staging this
pleasure-trope, this repression of the non-repressible, the psyche has
opened itself apart from within. Exteriority unfolds the psyche, its inner
surfaces multiplied beyond themselves out onto the unencompassable
planes of a shared necessity. Even in the midst of using death for its own
integrity, it performs an impossibility that explodes it.
How bad is it? Perhaps for the vast majority of Freudian slips this
need not be bothersome. Most slips do not say death, they give voice
to a lower-order pleasure they disclose practicably repressible ele-
ments whose repressibility de facto holds no threat of disintegrating the
psyche. So long as they can be repressed, the psyche can repress them
without undue fear of them ripping it apart. Marburg would seem
to belong in this category. Mildly masochistic maybe, it hardly brings
down the force of death, and so remains attached to Freud, not expos-
ing his psychic horizon to the stretching and puncturing that death
would have promised. Unless, of course, all slips and parapraxes, qua
pleasure-giving, immediately tune in to deaths penetrating and intense
frequency. Beyond the Pleasure Principle makes no distinctions: it
seems to say that all pleasure counts as deathly insofar as it seeks the
selfsame absence of stimulation that characterises death. In which case
not only does each minor slip carry a death-charge, thus posing the
psyche in all its wishful moments as utterly risked, but again the concept
of repression demands revision. The instant of deaths entry dissolves all
borders between repressed and non-repressed. Its complete necessity, as
we were saying, exempts it from the repression economy, for necessity
spells non-repressibility. The entire topology of the psyche would have
to change accordingly, repression serving not just as a function of the
psyche but as a structuring principle. As soon as pleasure gets bound
up with death, the hinges of the repression mechanism suddenly slip. If
everything pleasurable is deathly, nothing pleasurable can be repressed
and that precludes the formation of the Unconscious. More precisely,
the Unconscious becomes a counterfeit prison, lacking any secure limit.
It opens up, losing at a stroke its special status as a discrete psychic area.
The psyche must have a quite different structure from that described
by Freud, even after the shift from topographic to dynamic versions
of the psychic apparatus, for the latter leaves the essential relationship
between wish-fulfilment and wish-repression intact. Once the psyche
begins to wish nothing less than its founding act it begins to wish for
death, that is that state of peace already destined non-negotiably for it.
The certainty of this destiny renders all acts of repression futile or impos-
sible death cannot be made unconscious, neither can the Unconscious,

90 Death-Drive
at least in its Freudian formulation, establish itself. If there is repression,

if there is unconsciousness, their role is pseudonymous. The function
of wishing becomes that of withstanding deaths necessity, and doing
so through a kind of poetic gesture that creates a false recess, a theatri-
cal tomb or play-secret within the psyche, where the non-repressible is
believed to reside. What name could one give to that space within the
psyche of the non-repressible, the pseudo-repressible? In truth, it cannot
be named a space at all, more a refraction across the psyche of deaths
heavy light, a hologram. And it gets worse: the keystone of psychic
unity erodes further under pressure from deaths necessity. For necessity
can count a kind of absolute objectivity among its many features. No
relation developed by what remains of the individual psyche with its
own death will make any difference: repress it, mock-repress it, deny it
or ignore it, that death will happen. And though death happens to the
psyche as a psychic singularity (death cannot kill in general terms, it
can only kill specifically), as death and as necessary it abides eternally
outside the psyche, oblivious to the psyches singularity which it respects
only as a means of isolating that psyche when its number comes up.
The domino effect continues. With death reposted on the axis of
necessity, not only do psychic unity and the Unconscious begin to fall
over, but repression, already shaken, suffers a further blow. Where once
repression had truck with the very presence of death, now it cedes that
relation. Let us recall: the work of repression deposits material into
the Unconscious material that, to be sure, should remain hidden and
absent from consciousness but the deposit may always be reactivated.
Though hidden, it can be said still to be present, albeit withdrawn to a
secret location. The psyche sustains a relation with repressed material
with which it cohabits and which, though dormant, retains sufficient life
to be revived at any time. In a moment I shall turn to Jacques Derridas
writing on the death-drive, but already a not un-Derridean argument
emerges here. For the necessity, the remoteness, the inassimilability of
death already qualify any presence death might enjoy and of which,
in turn, the psyche might avail itself (how can one repress what has no
presence?). How does this come about? Necessity, prime factor of death,
does away with presence by dint of repelling all contingency. Defining
itself against contingency against, that is, temporalisation, coming-to-
presence, the potential to change or be changed, sensuous appearance
in time necessity steers death steeply up and away from the world
of presence and so beyond the grasp of repression. Such a beyond, of
course, crosses no spatial boundary, for necessity loops away with and
then makes vanish the coordinates of location per se. Nor is it its status
as necessity alone that puts death beyond repression. Death balks at

White Over Red 91
presence for a still more definitive reason, namely death has no pres-
ence, being nothing if not the end of presence, and a non-present end of
presence in general. What would death be if this were not so? And what
can repression do with the never-present? What is repressions fate? If
repression exists highly doubtful it neither represses in the Freudian
sense, for this presupposes a presence, nor does it allocate material
to a delimited psychic zone known as the Unconscious, for the latter
cannot yet have been built. It all results from that fusion of pleasure
with death that Freud essays in the later work. Pleasures disport with
death casts it out from presence and, at the same time, into the arms of
necessity. No psychic function can shelter from the violation done to the
psyches structure. Though the psyche may continue to wish to take
the pre-eminent example the concomitant work of repression must
now move in a mysterious way whereby its selected material flickers
in a twilight between its impossible repressive inclusion and its sheer
ectopic withdrawal. A quite other dimension interleaves itself in which
pleasure comes, or comes back, to the psyche without ever achieving
psychical connection. Nothing touches. As for Marburg, it could not
be Freuds error, classically speaking, for the seismic repressive tensions
that allowed for both its original staving-in and its subsequent bursting-
through could not but have coupled with a deathly force not different
from the force of pleasure that curves along, crosses over and divides
a non-proximate border to a disintegrating psyche.
Derridas highly nuanced relationship to Freud and to the death-
drive in both Freudian and other forms impacts this discussion in at
least two places. First, the Freudian slip may be reread in the terms
Derrida applies in particular to Husserl and throughout The Post Card.5
Considered as a time-delayed message the psyche sends itself, the slip
skirts a danger prevalent in all self-communication, namely losing the
message in transit. Marburg may not be Freuds error on the basis that
as a message the psyche emits though maladroitly it runs the risk of
hijack on its outward-bound as well as its return journey to the psyche,
whereupon it conveys the pleasurable embarrassment typical of slips.
Unless a message can in principle be lost, Derrida argues, it cannot be
sent potential failure supplies the condition of its success. Its not quite
that Marburg cannot be Freuds error but that, owing to the ineradica-
ble chance of it having been purloined en route, there is no way of telling
if it is or isnt. Extending this logic to the slip of death, what befalls
the psyche in its final moment would not necessarily count as the right
death at all. The psyche along with the body may die, but it may die
erroneously, dying a death that cannot unequivocally be called its own.
The slip may have got mixed up with others, been appropriated, etc. It

92 Death-Drive
may even be, as we have touched on in earlier chapters, that the domi-
nant philosophical and common-sense understanding of death as per-
taining intrinsically to the person who dies itself requires re-thinking.6
Nevertheless that death, that right-wrong instant is nothing if not cata-
strophic, and here we find an ambiguity in Freud that suffers a second
impact from Derridas work.
The ambiguity elides or confuses destruction with preservation. We
know the death-drive has as its ulterior goal a state of perfect peace
equivalent to the satisfaction of a wish the absence of unpleasure.
Again, we have touched on this before, but without giving consideration
to the flip-side (except, as in the last chapter, as a form of masochism).
In this formulation of death as peace the notion of destruction remains
curiously at bay, yet the death-drive surely does more than facilitate
pleasure, more than coax the living psyche the living soul, one might
say to slough off its own thrashing complexities. Were this the be-all
and end-all, death really would be a means of perfection, a rarefaction
of the psychic soul to its barest core. Indeed, along an arcing trajectory
a kind of ideal metempsychosis would have taken place. So where has
the destructive element in the death-instinct or the death-drive gone?
Freuds best answer says that it gets directed outwards onto other people
or things. For the purposes of clarification, I quote a long extract from
The Ego and the Id:
. . . we have to distinguish two classes of instincts, one of which, the sexual

instincts or Eros, is by far the more conspicuous and accessible to study. It
comprises not merely the uninhibited sexual instinct proper and the instinc-
tual impulses of an aim-inhibited or sublimated nature derived from it, but
also the self-preservative instinct, which must be assigned to the ego and
which at the beginning of our analytic work we had good reason for contrast-
ing with the sexual object-instincts. The second class of instincts was not so
easy to point to; in the end we came to recognise sadism as its representative.
On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put
forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic
life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros,
by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles
into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the
same time, of course, at preserving it. Acting in this way, both the instincts
would be conservative in the strictest sense of the word, since both would be
endeavouring to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emer-
gence of life. The emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continu-
ance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death; and life
itself would be a conflict and compromise between these two trends. The
problem of the origin of life would remain a cosmological one; and the
problem of the goal and purpose of life would be answered dualistically.
On this view, a special physiological process (of anabolism or catabolism)

White Over Red 93
would be associated with each of the two classes of instincts; both kinds of
instinct would be active in every particle of living substance, though in
unequal proportions, so that some one substance might be the principal
representative of Eros.
This hypothesis throws no light whatever upon the manner in which the
two classes of instincts are fused, blended, and alloyed with each other; but
that this takes place regularly and very extensively is an assumption indispen-
sable to our conception. It appears that, as a result of the combination of
unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of life, the death instinct of the
single cell can successfully be neutralised and the destructive impulses be
diverted on to the external world through the instrumentality of a special
organ. This special organ would seem to be the muscular apparatus; and the
death instinct would thus seem to express itself though probably only in
part as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and
other organisms.7
The deathliness of the death instincts works against others, not the self.
Where destructiveness wells up, it gets diverted outwards thanks to the
the combination of unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of
life. Thus Freuds account has the error of death, so far as it concerns
the psyche, made safe or perfect again. The directing outward of its
aggression shields the psyche from itself, preserving or conserving it
effectively it doubles as a life-instinct to add to its less compromised
egoic pulsions.
Freud is less than convinced or convincing, however. It is not self-evi-
dent that such an instinct can be diverted and remain the same, nor that
a residual or superordinate death-drive does not continue to operate,
fuelled by a remainder of destructiveness not expeditiously released
that intimidates the psyche in a less riddable manner. After all, if the
death-drive merits the status of a drive, a principle beyond the pleasure
principle no less, would it let itself be diverted in so economic a fashion?
Does it not rather structure the economy of the psyche in a let us say
transcendental way that would protect it from being routed hither
and thither? Could there not yet be a more virulent, a less servile slip
that energises the death-instinct, something that slips through psychic
control altogether? In Archive Fever, tats dme de la psychanalyse
and elsewhere, Derrida conducts an extremely interesting discussion
around these and related themes. In the most general terms, he will,
first of all, bring out and emphasise the destructive aspect of the death-
drive; secondly he will say that the death-drive does indeed destroy more
destructively, so to speak, than Freud gives credit for; and finally he will
argue that even within such hyper-destruction an affirmative element
prevails.
A few pages into Archive Fever Derrida lights on the sixth chapter of

94 Death-Drive
Freuds Civilisation and Its Discontents. The chapter is largely retro-

spective, with Freud relating the phased construction of psychoanalytic
theory, and loudly echoes the quote above from The Ego and the Id.
Freud again reins in the destructiveness of the death-instinct. He writes,
for example, that
even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of
destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognise that the satisfaction of the instinct
is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment,
owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latters old wishes for
omnipotence. The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it
were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide
the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature.8
One could describe Freuds view here as a civilising in its own right,
seeing as it does a powerfully countervailing movement to the blindest
fury of destructiveness, which restores the equilibrium of control over
nature. The destructiveness provides a vehicle of pleasure, a joy ride,
for the selfish ego, thus making any fury seem like bluster. In contrast
to Freuds civilising gesture, Derrida wants to wrest the destructiveness
back into focus. To aid him he refers to an earlier remark by Freud
concerning the silent quality of the death-instinct. In a few lines we
shall look at in some depth, Derrida says that the drive is mute, citing
Freuds German word, stumm. He continues:
It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any

archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in
truth the very motivation of its most proper movement.9
Derrida has begun his gloss or elaboration on Freuds remarks which,

beyond the word stumm, he quotes no further at this point. What
(Stracheys) Freud had actually written was:
It was not easy, however, to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death
instinct. The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It
might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organ-
ism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruit-
ful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external
world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness.
In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that
the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inani-
mate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this
aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-
destruction, which is in any case proceeding. At the same time one can
suspect from this example that the two kinds of instinct seldom perhaps
never appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other

White Over Red 95
in varying and very different proportions and so become un recognisable to

our judgement.10
Many, many things these are to note in this controversiae between

Derrida and Freud. Most obviously, Freud does not say the death
instinct is mute; he says It might be assumed that the death instinct
operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that,
of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the
instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an
instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness (my emphasis). That the
death-drive operated silently was an unprovable assumption and, whats
more, less fruitful than another idea. Again Freud saves the psyche, in
its early form as organism, from its own dissolution, and again by
mooting the diversion of destructive instincts outwards. (In any case
Freuds emphasis lies on the professional difficulties of demonstrat-
ing the death-drive, the silence of which stands in for a more general
statement about the death-drives inaccessibility to science.) Not much
more than hypotheses, these words about silence on the one hand and
external diversion on the other and of the two, Freud rejects the first.
So when Derrida says on Freuds behalf that the death-drive is mute, he
is making an assertion out of a hypothesis, and a discarded hypothesis at
that. His strong misreading as Harold Bloom might call it matters
because it goes to bolster his main thesis at this point in Archive Fever,
that the death-drive leaves nothing of its own behind.11 The supposed
silence of the death-drive permits Derrida to deduce that it never leaves
any archives of its own.12 The French text has, Elle est au travail, mais
ds lors quelle opre toujours en silence, elle ne laisse jamais darchive
qui lui soit propre.13 Now, the dubious silence suggests self-effacement,
perhaps, but does not absolutely imply it the confidence of mais ds
lors quelle cannot fully be justified. If it is a question of, yes, preserv-
ing the destructiveness of the death-drive, these few lines by Derrida
speak less to a defensible argument than to an apparent desire to make
sure, in the face of the ambiguity in Freuds text, that the death instinct
husbands the maximum destructiveness possible. Just as Freud civilises
the death-drive, so Derrida looks set to savage the civility, to destroy it.
And though the two instincts vie with each other, both Freudian and
Derridean seek to preserve something.
But let us try to be as clear as possible in this very dense context.
What does the death-drive, the death-instinct, the destruction-instinct
destroy? (Derrida calls it a three-named drive.)14 Is it the psyche or is
it the drive itself? And what would be the difference? On the question-
able assumption of its silence, Derrida claims the death-drive leaves

96 Death-Drive
nothing of its own behind: It destroys in advance its own archive,

as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper move-
ment.15 Self-destruction belongs definitively to the death-drive in so far
as it destroys its own archive, that is any trace of itself, whether or
not it also destroys more widely. Derridas vivid prose makes the point
with force, but two further blocks stand in its way. Of these Derrida
acknowledges only one: the death-drive has facility enough to disguise
itself to paint itself, as he puts it, in some erotic colour16 and if
it can do this, the death-drive seems very much to leave behind some-
thing. But in a remarkable, perhaps Heideggerian, turn of logic, Derrida
dismisses the problem:
This impression of erogenous colour draws a mask right on the skin. In other
words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor
in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As
inheritance it leaves only its erotic simulacrum . . .17
Remarkable because of the strict separation Derrida insists on between

the drive and its effects; Heideggerian because that withdrawal into
non-presence strongly evokes, at a structural level at least, the ontico-
ontological difference. The death-drive leaves nothing of itself behind,
having destroyed itself in advance, and yet it leaves an erotic simu-
lacrum. An erotic simulacrum is left, but the death-drive has not left it
or, if it has, is not present in it in any way. But how exactly? How could
even a non-present, auto-destructive drive simply desist from all relation
to its own disguise? How can its simulacrum not belong to it in any
way, shape or form? Is it axiomatic that a simulacrum cannot comport
in any way what it simulates? Is the disguise a simulacrum even? Having
acknowledged the possibility of such traces the exceptions to the rule
of destruction and dealt with it in this less than watertight fashion,
Derridas next paragraph begins, as if sweeping the problem under the
carpet, with But, the point must be stressed, this archiviolithic force
leaves nothing of its own behind . . .18 The other block, the one not
addressed by Derrida, takes the form of Freuds diversions. For the
death-drive, as Freud has said, can divert itself outwards as aggression,
in which case it has done nothing if not preserve itself, even if in an alter-
native mode, and even if, as we have seen, some of its destructive power
may have been tempered. In sum, there are four chinks in Derridas
thesis of the death-drives self-destruction:
1. Contrary to Derridas move, Freud does not assert that the death-
drive works in silence.
2. It is not unquestionable that such silence indicates self-destruction.

White Over Red 97
3. The death-drive can disguise itself, and its disguises may as well as
not preserve it.
4. The death-drive may also divert itself outwards, thus keeping itself
alive in other forms.
None of this means that Derrida may not be right, but his grounds, on
these two pages at least, want stability. If Derrida persists with his argu-
ment in this pressing and overdetermined manner, its dynamic derives in
part from something over and above any logic or reason deployed. His
words, his tone, have the feel of a destruction-instinct, in short as far
as one can ever detect such a thing the wilful sustenance of a destruc-
tive power. This instinct brims over the logical steps that Derrida makes
or wants to make, even as a dangerous supplement to the argumenta-
tion. No proof can be had here but, were it true, it would point not to a
silence of the death-drive, but to a volubility, a copious over-saying. By
the same token, a multitude of traces and effects would present them-
selves, the death-drive having egregiously failed to destroy anything of
itself or to stem the proliferation of delegates.
In the later tats dme de la psychanalyse Derrida inflects somewhat
differently the position in Archive Fever. I offer my own translation,
along with the original:
For thought for psychoanalytic thought to come is there another beyond,

if I can call it such, a beyond which would pitch itself beyond those possible
beyonds still represented by both the pleasure and reality principles and the
death instincts or sovereign mastery, all of which seem to exert themselves
wherever cruelty declares itself? In other words in quite other words can
this apparently impossible, but differently impossible, thing be thought,
namely a beyond of the death-drive and of sovereign mastery, and therefore
the beyond of a cruelty, a beyond having nothing to do with either drives or
principles?
Y a-t-il, pour la pense, pour la pense psychanalytique venir, un autre

au-del, si je puis dire, un au-del qui se tienne au-del de ces possibles que
sont encore et les principes de plaisir et de ralit et les pulsions de mort ou
de matrise souveraine qui semblent sexercer partout o de la cruaut
sannonce? Autrement dit, tout autrement dit, peut on penser cette chose
apparemment impossible, mais autrement impossible, savoir un au-del de
la pulsion de mort ou de matrise souveraine, donc lau-del dune cruaut,
un au-del qui naurait rien voir ni avec les pulsions ni avec les
principes?19
We find Derrida establishing the agenda for his subsequent analysis,

but already substantial leverage on Freud is being exerted as he pushes
inquisitively, impatiently on the ceiling of psychoanalytic thought,

98 Death-Drive
looking for access to another beyond. One of the conquests of Archive

Fever had already been, legitimately or not, to impugn the standing of
the death-drive as a principle (we must not forget that the death-drive,
originary though it may be, is not a principle, as are the pleasure and
reality principles),20 and now, once more, a doing-down of principles
comes into view. A beyond of the beyond glimmers on this threshold:
just as in Archive Fever the death-drive will have destroyed itself while
maintaining a certain force, so here the beyond of the beyond betokens a
caesura in the death-drives presence, whether it started with any or not.
In such a surpassing beyond, death could not be in any form. It espe-
cially could not be a principle, this requiring some architectonic rela-
tionship to its complementary or family terms, whereas in what Derrida
writes all structures architectonic, metaphysical, psychoanalytic come
up against their nec plus ultra. A different dimension, not just overleap-
ing the dimension of the antecedent beyond, but exiting dimensionality
altogether, places itself invisibly in Derridas speculative schema.
In another variation on the argument in Archive Fever Derrida now
introduces the notion of cruelty, and with this we return to our debate
around errors the maleficent-beneficent, happy faults the psyche lives
by. Already Derrida can envisage a beyond of cruelty too (a beyond of
the death-drive and of sovereign mastery, and therefore the beyond of
a cruelty) or, more precisely, the beyond of a certain type of cruelty,
the received kind, that borne along by the psychoanalytic instinct for
destruction. Just a few lines earlier he stated he would not pursue the
question of a cruel instinct of destruction or annihilation (une pulsion
cruelle de destruction ou danantissement).21 Rather he wishes to pin-
point cruelty in that realm where the death-drive will have destroyed its
own archive, where even principles have unravelled, where all guiding
reason, all overarching law, all remits of the possible, all capacity to
make sense of things, have fallen away an anarchic realm, as Archive
Fever styles it.22 What takes place in this realm of madness that governs
the psyche under its anarchic sway? Can the psyche still recover itself
within this world of aberration and indeterminacy? Can it yet convert
the error all around into something sustaining for its living soul?
Derrida will make no positive statement perhaps none is possible
but in a hypothesis upon a hypothesis he will conjure the thought that
this exquisite destructiveness of the beyond of the beyond, of the cruelty
without measure, may be precisely the stuff of life. In the course of a sen-
tence that will detain us a while, he writes if there is something irreduc-
ible in the life of the living being, in the soul, in the psyche . . . and if this
irreducible thing in the life of the animate being is indeed the possibility
of cruelty . . . (sil y a quelque chose dirrductible dans la vie le ltre

White Over Red 99
vivant, dans lme, dans la psych . . . et si cette chose irrductible dans

la vie de ltre anim est bien la possibilit de la cruaut . . .),23 and then
goes on to conclude a long sentence. A link has been forged between life
and death. For the irreducible thing in the life of the animate being may
be the possibility of cruelty, and the possibility of cruelty hails from the
death-drive in its both inwardly and externally destructive form. How
does cruelty come to have such lineage? According to Derrida, cruelty
has become the drive, if you will, of evil for evils sake, of a suffering
which would play at enjoying the suffering of a making-suffer or of a
making itself suffer for the sake of pleasure (La pulsion, si vous voulez,
du mal pour le mal, dune souffrance qui jouerait jouir de souffrir dun
faire-souffrir ou dun se-faire souffrir pour le plaisir).24 It has embraced
the fatal Freudian interanimation of death and pleasure, Thanatos and
Eros, and reconfigured it so that now the death-drive, having been
determined by cruelty in this way, no longer submits to following an
end or purpose, either for a purpose or goal for itself, or a purpose or
goal in general. Now it associates with mal pour le mal, evil for its own
sake which should not be read as a self-directed, self-fulfilling project
in which evil seeks to posit itself, but as unbound, arbitrary, deathly
pantomime without justification, and therefore without justice or prin-
ciple. Yet this chaotic, unjustifiable, even meaningless surplus, because
it cannot be reduced, explained away or placed in a higher category,
has to be respected as somehow essential, uncircumventable, an indel-
ible imprint in all living being(s). It breathes, therefore, in the very quick
of life, as a principle-sans-principle despite the risk, despite the moral
confusion of affirmation. This dreadful, originary contamination of
life helps fertilise its coming-to-be. Error would now mean not a devia-
tion from the correct path, but a deviation from path-ness, so to speak,
and towards error for its own sake, for no reason the possibility of
which allows for all subsequent paths to be laid.
How are we to understand this quasi-erroneous, ultra-malign evil
for evils sake? What does the expression for its sake really mean?
Derridas [le] mal pour le mal may or may not resonate with lart pour
lart, art for arts sake, but it engages an aesthetic of sorts, not unre-
lated to Kants notion of art as purposefulness without purpose. And
how does the for its own sake relate back to psychoanalytic theory?
Is that where pleasure began, in a for its own sake? If we go back and
follow through Derridas thought in Archive Fever concerning erotic
colour, we come upon this:
. . . the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in

its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As

100 Death-Drive
inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting

[this an allusion to Derridas earlier text The Truth in Painting],25 its sexual
idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impression are
perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the
beautiful. As memories of death.26
Taking this together with tats dme de la psychanalyse it seems a

primordial cruelty, that of the self-destroying destruction-drive, gives
out onto beauty as a distant disguise of that cruelty for its own sake.
Origins, principles are razed in a saturnalian bonfire of metaphysics
and, in its traceless trace, false impressions, meretricious designs, are left
as pseudonymous testaments of that ultimate cruelty one that, having
annihilated itself in a hyperbolic gesture, will never have been. We have
come a long way from the Freudian slip and yet the for its own sake
was just what empowered the psyche to take its pleasure beyond the
Unconscious. Granted, this may constitute another strong misreading
of Freud, but what are slips and other symptoms if not a pleasurable
cruelty for its own sake, a making itself suffer for the sake of pleasure,
in Derridas terms? After all, the psyche had the means of repression,
had generated everything it needed to manage its own profit-and-loss,
so why these fireworks of errors from the unconscious? Freud catalogues
them under neurosis, but this exorbitant expos for no good reason
characterised by the slip could equally be seen as a more disconcertingly
wayward superabundance of error, of pleasurable cruelty, unjustified
by even a neurotic need for expression or failure to prevent it. For the
sake of what, then, do slips and errors get made? For their own sake?
As a word, sake has experienced a rich history in northern European
languages where often it comes to mean cause in a legal sense: having a
case or cause or thing (sake connects to the German Sache, meaning
thing in English). By extension, almost by inversion, it has meant guilt
and even sin. It signifies that presenting thing in either a court of law
or broader arena of justice and justification, by which the plaintiff will
present a cause and, critically, a cause that pertains exclusively to
them, their cause, their sake as a marker of social, judicial, moral iden-
tity in the world. Sake points back at its bearer. In this context of self-
protection here is my sake, my thing, that I am defending, the cause I
will not forsake it bears intimately upon the survival of its proprietor.
As such, a sake gets trapped between two opposing tensions, both req-
uisite for it: on the one hand, this thing must make its case and justify
itself in public, rational terms; on the other, it cannot be presented,
denoting as it does the very innerness of my interiority, my sake, my
ownmost as Heidegger might say, that energy of a self-preservation
too archaic, too private ever to come forward and thereby risk not being

White Over Red 101
seen as my cause, my sake, any longer. Its authenticity harbours in this

inexpressible living singularity forced to defend itself by an exposure
that ruins by definition that sakeful innerness. In the Freudian death-
drive, as we have seen, there is little to suggest the catatonic implosion
of the death-instinct that Derrida sees in it and to this extent the
Freudian death-drive is preserved for its own sake, can adopt the rank
of principle, of eternal psychical structure. It makes sense, then, that
Freuds language itself becomes one of justification, an attempted ration-
alisation of the death-drive before the academic or professional court,
whereas in Derridas notion of cruelty as modus of the death-drive, an
instinct works precisely against its own sake, against its own survival: its
cause is to destroy its sediments, itself, and in so doing it forefends any
requirement of self-justification. And yet he can write of [le] mal pour
le mal (my emphasis): does it death, cruelty, evil preserve its non-
preservation? Is the absolute liberty that exonerates it from facing the
law and making its case something it must guard for its own sake?
With these themes of beauty, justification, the death-drive, I want to
finish by picking out, from the millions of artifacts available, just one, as
a touchstone for this discussion. This is Mark Rothkos painting White
Over Red. Is there any sense in which we can revise the slogan art
for arts sake in the light of a pleasurable cruelty that does away with
itself? Any first move would have to go beyond aesthetics as a domain
of the transcendental or the metaphysics of principles (the temptation
will always be to reappropriate such a beyond, even a beyond of
the beyond, as a latter-day Sublime). One passage would be through
the archiviolithic as Derrida puts it, though we shall have cause to
intervene in and adjust some of his thinking. Let us say that the archi-
violithic is that self-destroying thing without a cause that leaves both
lovely impressions and, in its form as irreducible cruelty, also animate
beings, psyches and souls. Because both of these derive from that deathly
force, both the living being and the dead artistic object, it may be that
they share in something that, despite the apparent difference, unites
them, that even melts the distinction between life and death. Or better,
their shared parentage in the suicidal death-drive may mean that dead
objects, artistic, painterly, aesthetic or cosmetic falsities inhere in the
living soul or psyche and vice versa. Now that principles, categories,
architectonics, lie among its wreckage, the death-drive will have cleared
the way for the absolutely unexpected, the indeterminable per se, that
which will both have and be pure difference new, unique, quite unique.
And this may be precisely what the psyche is, that is the living soul, the
unique, new, unheralded erroneous difference of a new living thing for
its own sake and it its own autochthonous perfection.

102 Death-Drive
Mark Rothko, White Over Red (1957) 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and
Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009. Reproduced with
permission.
Can we approach art in this way, as the facture of erroneous

singularities? Can the art object, in its intense singularity, be said to
represent (not the right word) the loss of generality or of principle?
Evidently, art objects will always belong or be understood as belonging
to schools, movements, isms, periods and oeuvres, and to that degree
acquiesce in their own generalisation or tabulation. But what occurs at
this empirical level of taxonomy and classification does not pre-empt
and may even signal resistance to a possibility further out, that of

White Over Red 103
the unique error, a singularity eluding classification, that enables the

art object to appear as such, as itself, a pleasurable entity, and to do so
by having first destroyed itself so as to allow the positing of its special
traits. While classification will instruct us in the genealogy of an object,
where it belongs, its art-historical coordinates, the object for its part will
in a very early moment, before it even begins have had to neutral-
ise and annul all genealogy in order to create the possibility of its own
genealogical appearance. But whose pleasure is it? On the model of the
Freudian slip, the artwork would redound pleasurably to the artist as a
kind of psychic skid from the unconscious that leaves colourful patterns
tokens on the outside, in their gilded folly, of some erotic sense from
the psychic inside. Within this somewhat conventional hermeneutic
environment, that pleasure could then be activated at intervals by this or
that beholder and made to fit, or not, some personal inner eros. Freuds
proviso here would be that art objects, being good sublimators, have
made the psychic journey far enough to arrive at classical or civilised
ground, lost their rebarbative erotic accent, and let all artistic inter-
course become proper. By contrast, we are confronted with a pleasure
that cuts across the hermeneutic exchange between individual psyches.
Such pleasure, once again, would be that for its own sake, that is the
protection of its emergence as such, the pleasure of a determinate con-
tingency, of being a living thing, in possession of some anima or psyche
not to be conflated too readily with a bios.
When I then turn to this painting I am, first of all, turning to this
painting and no other. True, what you see is a reproduction; moreover,
for this or any reproduction to exist there must have been, to borrow
again from Derridas stock, a reproducibility in and of the original
itself that could be said to corrupt its originality.27 But these facts do
not (nor would Derrida claim they do) impede the reference to Mark
Rothkos White Over Red, this one, the one of 1959, the definite article
by Mark Rothko and no other. Its originality may indeed have suf-
fered a corruption from the possibility of being reproduced, but the
painting, regardless of the number or form of copies in circulation, can
yet attest to being this painting and this painting only. Such a faculty
suggests in turn a decisive break with everything not itself, even where it
alludes to or intertextualises with other works, painterly or not. It may
well come to be associated or classified with other works; it may, more
fundamentally, have been sourced in its influence from them; but still,
to be itself, alone, to take up that essential solitude of the artwork,28
such a break will indeed need to have occurred. If it continues to relate
to anything before that break it does so, at this level, only from within
itself, as if by memory, for all such things will have been annihilated for

104 Death-Drive
it as a prerequisite for its own emergence all will have been brought
forward but only into it, into the artwork, nowhere else, and brought
forward only as, precisely, those things everything it will have left
out from itself in order to establish its own sake. It brings forward what
it has had to exclude or abolish for its own sake, for, having been abol-
ished by the artwork, such things other artworks or texts can be said
to survive but as utterly excluded in the new artwork only. More
thoroughgoing than Hegelian sublation or Aufhebung, this process pro-
hibits any incorporation or retention of excluded elements, but rather
signals exclusion and exclusivity per se. Relating now to everything it
has excluded, which can be nothing less than everything else, the new
artwork, in its singularity, accedes to an undreamed-of intertextual-
ity without semantic or hermeneutic connections. For his part Derrida
seems to claim that the new artwork itself would get caught up in this
movement of exclusion. As erotic simulacrum the artwork will have
passed through a moment of cruel self-incineration before making its
appearance, such that, in its final presence, it will have excluded its very
self too or, more exactly, the archiviolithic death-drive has done itself
in and left these lovely impressions divorced from their thanatographic
origin. But that, as I say, is where we take issue with Derrida. If beauty
sails under the star of the death-drive, the light from the latter is made
up of two near-indistinguishable elements: (1) the error of contingency,
the destruction of all genera; (2) beautys moment of exclusion or anni-
hilation that cuts off everything else for its own sake. Neither amounts
to an archiviolithic death-drive in the Derridean sense, despite their
proximity to it: the psychic self-preservation of the artwork will have
been achieved not through a memory of death to paraphrase Derrida,
but through a hyperbolic access of self-positing that gives it though
this is not the opposite life.
Now, no painting can illustrate this status it holds it simply is it.
It would be feeble to claim therefore that the play of white and red in
Rothkos painting, for example, somehow demonstrates the generative
rupture in its own coming-to-be, for rather the painting as a whole and
the fact of the painting are of such status. This could all serve to disarm
any critical relation to the painting. After all, how does one engage with
the status of a work? Can there be any aesthetic rapport in a space and
register so abstruse? But the problem is false. Precisely because that
status delivers this work, this object, an all the more aesthetic that
is particular, critical, sensitive, customised response is called for. Such
a response might want to begin from the terra firma of symbols: for
instance, the political and/or military connotations of white and red in
tension with one another. Or the contusion of white and red may tempt

White Over Red 105
us into seeing if not the status of the artwork illustrated, at least an alle-
gory of that status, for the red could suggest a violence that the white
this is white over red has come to salve and dress, as if the painting
were acting out the trauma of, if we follow Derrida, the originary vio-
lence done to it and by it from which it now recovers or redeems into
its own existence. Equally, we might want to identify in that screen of
white the intimation of a beyond and, in its garb of recessive whiteness,
even a beyond of a beyond. But such readings are tendentious at best.
There is also a more straightforward psychoanalytic reading of Rothkos
painting as perfect error, which says that much like a Freudian slip
White Over Red embodies repressed material inadvertently exposed;
or, given its obviously crafted nature, repressed material pretty suc-
cessfully sublimated into civilised if original form, a notion supported
by the paintings formal affinity with the majority of Rothkos output.
And we could carry on putting our interpretative coins into Rothkos
red-and-white box to make it speak different idioms. The paintings
own silence heralds at once a complete resistance, a flat repugnance, to
being spoken for and a cavernous openness or accessibility to voices that
would invade and inhabit it there is an astonishing vulnerability of the
art object in general, and of this painting in particular, to such voices.
If it makes sense at all to speak of the sound of this painting, it would
be the sound precisely of that contradictory movement between the
stilling of all voices and the forming of a kind of voice-box the paint-
ing become a voice-box vibrating with the murmur of tongues. Again,
it would be foolish to think of White Over Red actually representing
such a contradiction. Secondly to stay with the tone or, for want of a
better phrase, the structural affect of White Over Red rather than trace
its hermeneutic profile is it too far-fetched to claim of this painting that
it thinks? As well as the formal hints of thinking in the painting the
white screen as the eyes/head/brain/forehead, its measured elevation, the
apparent privilege of vision and the cerebral (white) over the somatic or
visceral (red) is there not thoughtful appraisal in or of this painting,
not thinking as calculation, but an it thinks of a status not a million
miles from Heideggers es gibt? If so, such an it thinks provides the
necessary accompaniment to the notion of its own sake, that labile ref-
erence to its having undergone the rigours of exclusion in order to arrive
here as itself, for this thinking it does has been prompted by the need to
shield itself as itself, to be at the beginning of justifying itself as such, to
come to the threshold of reason but no further. It is at this point that the
painting preserves its error, itself.
Who will decide if death has a place in these beautiful, artistic errors?
Slipped out, released into itself, does the artwork not call out to be

106 Death-Drive
reconsidered, whether or not it has a dark history in the death-instincts,

compromised or not by an inner structure of reproduction, in terms of
its impossible self-justification? It has made a mistake for its own sake,
guilty of its own contingency, and that is why and what it thinks. No
amount of talking will pardon it. Sorry.
Notes
1. SE, VI, p. 217.
2. Perhaps I am being unfair in calling Freud pompous thanks to Julian
Patrick for the following note: The German for this sentence is Ich
behaupte auch, da Ich dies immer gewut habe, which A. A. Brill, other-
wise so error prone, translates simply and correctly as I maintain that I
always knew this. (Brill leaves out auch, because unlike assert,
maintain implies it.) So there goes the pomposity. Blame Strachey. And
the typesetters for the extra and: its gone in the Penguin Freud
Library.
3. SE, XV, pp. 21751.
4. SE, XVIII, p. 36.
5. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserls
Theory of Signs, trans. with an Introduction by David B. Allison, Preface by
Newton Garver (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973);
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1987).
6. See also my Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
7. SE, XIX, pp. 401.
8. SE, XXI, p. 121.
9. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 10.
Hereafter referred to as Archive Fever.
10. SE, XXI, p. 119.
11. Archive Fever, p. 11.
12. Ibid., p. 10.
13. Jacques Derrida, Mal darchive (Paris: ditions Galile, 1995), p. 24.
15. Ibid., p. 10.
16. Ibid., p. 11.
17. Ibid., p. 11.
18. Ibid., p. 11.
19. Jacques Derrida, tats dme de la psychanalyse (Paris: ditions Galile,
2000), p. 14. Hereafter referred to as tats dme. See also Derridas earlier
essay, The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, in
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 23250.

White Over Red 107
21. tats dme, p. 14.

23. tats dme, p. 12.
24. Ibid., p. 2.
25. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
27. For an interesting discussion concerning the place of the original artwork in
relation to its copies, see Jrme Dokic, Music, Noise, Silence: Some
Reflections on John Cage, trans. Timothy S. Murphy and Robert Smith, in
Angelaki 3: 2 (1998), 10312.
28. I refer to Maurice Blanchots essay of the same name, in The Gaze of
Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams
Sitney with a Preface by Geoffrey Hartman (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill
Press, 1981), pp. 6377.

Chapter 5
Literature Repeat Nothing
Words, words, words. (Hamlet)
The title of Ian McEwans 1998 novel, Enduring Love, invites images
of a romantic relationship surviving adversity with the rich resources of
sentimental intensity. But those images are qualified severely when the
story gets under way. First, the love portrayed is unrequited; second, it is
pathological; third, it is homosexual (in a markedly heterosexual world);
fourth, it is a manifestation of Christian fanaticism. The word endur-
ing in the title becomes menacing, suggesting obsession. It also reflects
back on the object of the love who must endure the menace such love
presents.
The unrequited, pathological, homosexual, Christian-fanatic lover
is called Jed Parry; his beloved, the novels protagonist, is Joe, through
whose first-person narrative the novel mainly proceeds. Until Jed comes
along, Joe, who writes popular science articles for magazines, has an
enduring love of his own, of a conventional, secular, bourgeois and het-
erosexual kind, with Clarissa, a lecturer in English literature. Although
Joe and Clarissas relationship gets derailed by Jeds obsessive love for
Joe, the couple ultimately reconcile, with Jed by then securely cordoned
off in a mental asylum. The structure of the novel provides a fairly
obvious defence of such Gemtlichkeit as lived by Joe and Clarissa, with
the outsider banished from their world after a kind of trial by otherness.
Joe and Clarissas love endures, but so does that of Jed who for years
continues undeterred to write Joe impassioned letters from the asylum
letters which the staff do not pass on, in the interests of protecting Joe
and, in effect, the values he represents.
Issues of class consciousness aside, Enduring Love foregrounds the
longevity of love, its tenacity and its dependence on a notion of perpe-
tuity. Jed embodies it in taking up vigil outside Joes house: love keeps
coming back, indefatigably; love endures. If love is a generally libidinal

Literature Repeat Nothing 109
phenomenon, its libidinality is almost pure energy, ever-burning and

inextinguishable, a sustaining fuel which keeps the lover productive and
energised, constantly creative and restless in his solicitation of the love
object. Indeed, love would have to be libidinal, for only the libido (at
least as conceived by Freud) could sustain such unreserved productivity.
Jed finds ever-new inspiration for his paeans to Joe, even in the face of
Joes rebuffs; in fact the rebuffs are inconsequential relative to the sheer
prolific engagement of Jeds enduring love.
But therein lies a paradox. Is such libidinal energy creative or destruc-
tive? Original or repetitious? Productive or reductive? In his letters
Jed can always find fresh material with which to apostrophise Joe and
express love for him, but precisely that creativity is obsessive, repeti-
tive and monomaniacal. The letters are always fresh and stale in equal
measure: surprisingly new, sometimes absurdly so, so unbounded is
their ingenuity; but also crushingly repetitive, with their solipsistically
incorrigible insistences and pleas. Is there any fundamental difference
between allegedly pathological love and the normal kind? It would
only take Joes acquiescence in the relationship for Jeds love to be nor-
malised. Both kinds of love come under the same stricture to endure,
and endurance presents us with a deeply puzzling quality. What kind of
resourcefulness is it that the libido harbours? Does it deaden or invent?
To the extent that love must endure to prove itself, its libidinal energy
channelled towards reaffirmation, cannot its sustainment and repetition
over time be seen equally as deathly and reductive as creative and life-
affirming? As much as it is energetic, libidinal and resourceful, endur-
ing love is also monotonous, constant, singular, reductive and, in this
regard, resourceless.
This paradox in the notion of libidinal creativity will be my guiding
thread, as I transpose it to the creativity involved in literary works (in a
sense Jeds tireless, eroticised writing is literary work of its own). I begin
with the assumption that whatever else the literary might be, it apper-
tains to creative writing: though not all creative writing is literary, all
literary writing is creative. Insofar as they are creative, literary works
may be grouped with other artifacts and activities that transmute or sub-
limate libidinal energy into a more or less civilised form. All are expres-
sions, in a sense, of enduring love. What distinguishes literary from other
creative works is a question I address at the chapters end. But I begin by
filling out the psychoanalytic background condensed in the terminology
of the libido and of sublimation that I have already used.
In contrast to the subsequent wealth and sophistication of literary
criticism and theory considering itself psychoanalytic, Freuds own writ-
ings on the subject of literature as such are, as is well known, few and

110 Death-Drive
often surprisingly ingenuous. His most general statement appears in

Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908 [1907]). Freud casts crea-
tive writing as a form of day-dream or phantasy akin to childs play:
The creative writer [the German word is Dichter which carries no nec-
essary implication of creativity, even though it might suggest the same]
does the same as the child at play.1 This is not to suggest that creative
writing is all sweetness and light. The phantasies are displacements of
wishes repressed and never impinge upon a happy person:
We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied
one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single
phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.2
Being phantasy-driven, creative writing thus labours under the sign

of unhappiness. However, the creative writer will transform such
subjective misery into objective pleasure, sparing the reader from the
indecorousness of the writerly condition, modifying egoistic interests
and proffering aesthetic satisfaction instead. He or she does so through
disguises:
The writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and
disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal that is, aesthetic yield
of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies.3
Elsewhere Freud argues for the sexual essence of such aesthetic pleasure,
a kind of foreplay or fore-pleasure; here his focus on disguise blends
with an argument for the reconstructibility, or rather the aetiological
completeness, of the creative or phantasying process. He has already
assured us that even the most extreme deviation from that model [of
the day-dream] could be linked with [creative writing] through an unin-
terrupted series of transitional cases,4 and now he implies again the
ideality, so to speak, of the creative psyche which, for all the detours
it will have taken, all the masks it will have put on for its phantasy-
aesthetic, may nevertheless be tracked back to its motive origin. Though
the highways and byways of phantasy be many and wayward, all belong
in the same psychic dimension, affirming the latters unity even as they
scramble and warp it.
That motive origin, of course, has the libidinal form of a wish, and a
wish, because it constitutes the psyche as such, can never be destroyed,
only repressed and/or dissimulated. The wish furnishes an impregnable
reserve to fund creative activity. The creative, in this case literary,
works resulting mark the devious formal or aesthetic accommodations
of repressed and refracted wish. In so bursarial a system, the stronger

the repression of the wish, the more creative the psyche is likely to be.
In an analogous case we shall turn to, Freud proposes that [t]he greater
the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace
remembering.5 The push-and-pull effect is clear. Creativity increases
with repression.
The exchequer of this system is not unproblematic, however. The
Freudian psyche, as we suggested, does make for a holistic entity (despite
the internal interference it generates), but, importantly, is unable to
assume its own integrity. The in this case literary psyche depends for
its literary disposition upon a wish, its repression and its subsequent
escape from repression, in the camouflage of aesthetic form; it will have
duped the censoring mechanism of repression into allowing the now dis-
guised, even beautified, wish into the showplace of representation (no
representation without distortion). The repressed promises the writer
aesthetic treasure, but, being repressed, remains locked to any conscious
raiding of it. The writer waits on its whim, powerless to regulate the
flow of material which, when it bursts through, he or she will make into
literature. The repressed shrinks from intentional appropriations of it;
a schism in the psyche has formed, the writer become, to paraphrase
Nietzsche, a stranger to himself.
With the repressed now the fount of literary material, what the
creative writer has been endopsychically separated from is effectively a
muse. Deposed from its deific or transcendent altitude, the muse of clas-
sicism has been reallocated by psychoanalytic modernity to the psyche,
preserving therein a distance that replicates the effects of such height
and authority. What was very high has become very deep. The function
remains the same. Where the muse was transcendent, capricious, exterior
and yet private, so the literary repressed stands inaccessible, unpredict-
able, lodging within the psyche as a kind of outside or unbroachable
recess. The writer becomes the mere dummy or secretary of an inscruta-
ble force that is at once intimate and foreign, close yet remote. Freud has
thus given variation to a long-standing theme in literary tradition. The
ablest expositor of this tradition, Timothy Clark, sums it up:
In both the Platonic and the biblical traditions inspiration described the sup-
posed possession of an individual voice by some transcendent authority. The
muse speaks, and the poet is only her mouthpiece or servant; or in the medi-
eval Christian tradition the human scriptor has authority only as a scribe of
divine truth.6
The writer merely transcribes his own repressed, his muse.

But evidently, an ambiguity bothers this structure. On the one hand,
nothing could be more creative or original than the writer who is

112 Death-Drive
inspired. On the other hand, this inspiration derives from without the
writer, or at least from outside the precincts of intention, and so circum-
scribes any creativity claimed. The level of volition and agency defies
being specified a problem traceable perhaps to theological disputation
concerning free will (how far are our actions voluntary, how far pre-
scribed?). The muse, the literary repressed: each is the writers personal
other, which dictates imperiously either an already known material lat-
terly veiled through the anamnesis of repression, or an entirely new stock
of words. Either way, inspiration comes as a surprise to the conscious
mind, and its not certain that the writer, whatever singularity that des-
ignates, knows whats going on. At the same time, as much as he or she
is possessed by this closeted voice of inspiration, the writer is possessed
of the literary skill which belatedly orders the messages coming through
into aesthetic wordings. What, then, is the nature of creativity? For all
the aesthetic gain got via this psychic exchange where repressed voices
splinter through, its final products literary works remain pathogenic
objects, even in the aura of their new-found beauty, just as in the Platonic
tradition invoked by Clark, inspiration closely resembles mania, and
poetry is the cooled fire of frenzy. They result from a process the creativ-
ity of which appears spurious, as much a blind irrigation of pulsional
urges as the blessed act of free artistry that creativity might suggest.
The ambiguity gets carried over into later psychoanalytic writing. In a
Kleinian study titled Dream, Phantasy and Art, Hanna Segal avers:
The act of creation at depth has to do with an unconscious memory of a har-

monious internal world and the experience of its destruction; that is, the
depressive position. The impulse is to recover and recreate this lost world.7
Segals emphasis on reparation, on a paradise regained, construes the

creative work as a compensatory epiphenomenon of mental well-being
in rather simple opposition to the trauma it supersedes and alleviates,
leaving its creativity unclear: note the irresolution in the word recreate.
The creator has only redeemed the Atlantis of his inspiration, not made
it afresh; and, according to Kleinian teaching, that world would reap-
pear anyway, if not in creative then in destructive and regressive acts
of vengeance. The word impulse is equally telling, hedging as it does
between conscious and unconscious action. The definite article serves
only to mystify it: The impulse. Whose impulse? Where in the psyche
does an impulse spring from? The nearest Segal comes to an answer
amounts to a tautology:
The artistic impulse is specifically related to the depressive position. The

artists need is to recreate what he feels in the depth of his internal world.8

While Segal reproduces the ambiguity there in Freud (not that its reso-
lution is at all obvious), she departs strikingly from the Freudian view
of repression. Creativity increases with repression for Freud, whereas
Segal points to the laxity of repression which is decisive for allowing
the expression of phantasy.9 The difference opens a deep cleft within
psychoanalytic theory and, as far as I know, little notice has been taken
of it. It has to do with a liberalising of Freud, a humanistic eliding of
expression with freedom, where repression can be coaxed by means of
therapy to step aside and allow the bounty of creation through in all its
goodness. The build-up of repressive pressure must be alleviated and
creativity will ensue, in a model of aesthetic production that looks inno-
cent next to Freuds recognition of the subterfuge required for artworks
to deceive the watchtower of repression. In Freud aesthetic works are
only and essentially disguised; in Segal they are the denuded tokens of
inner truth.
In the latter view, creativity has become what Clark, glossing Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, calls a vestige of Romantic individualism.10 It is
moreover central to a concept of subjectivity11 a subjectivity which,
purportedly bestowed with an inner essence, needs the complementary
functions of creativity and expression to bring that essence out and
thus confirm it was always there. Creativity supports a doctrine of free,
democratic, subjective, essentialist individualism. Other psychoanalytic
literature, especially of a therapeutic bent, only endorses the doctrine.
A version of it appears in a text by Christopher Bollas, called Cracking
Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience. Resuming the books thesis,
Bollas writes:
This process of collecting condensations which in turn serve as the material

of disseminative scattering is vital to individual unconscious creativity in
living. If a person has been fortunate enough to develop this capability, then
he will develop in turn a separate sense, which evolves from a certain kind
of unconscious development and is part of the function of unconscious intui-
tion. However, this kind of inner experiencing may be impossible for an
individual whose life is dominated by a trauma, whatever its source.12
On the same page Bollas talks of [u]nconscious freedom, as opposed

to unconscious imprisonment, and this dualism sustains the whole
book, including the quote above. What is vital is the freeing-up of an
unconscious otherwise in danger of paralytic seizure. Bollas complicates
the trope of creative release by giving it the hour-glass shape of col-
lecting condensations which in turn serve as the material of dissemina-
tive scattering, but the complication leaves the opposition between
free and unfree, the quick and the deathly, frozen and thawed, intact.

114 Death-Drive
His innovation lies in positing an oxymoronically mature narcissism,

whereby the creative individual has evolved an internal separate sense,
a kind of genius of the psyche, to register creative activity.13 Bollas has
also sublated the difference between aesthetic and non-aesthetic into a
general creativity in living. No especial privilege redounds to works
commonly considered aesthetic, so that the free, healthy, released prac-
tice of absorbed day-dreaming, for example, bears in principle equal
aesthetic rank as a work such as Moby-Dick, which Bollas discusses.
True, Freud also associates aesthetic work with day-dreaming, but he
specifically differentiates the aesthetic by its formal quality.
The somewhat facile healthiness in Bollas portrait of individual
creativity has clearly sloughed off the darker, more painfully wrought
elements attending Freudian aesthetic work. In both Freud and Segal, in
fact, literary products constitute the more or less transparent, more or
less displaced, preservations of trauma (a term as vague and idealised
as original sin, and with similar implications), where Bollas regrets that
it may be impossible to accede to creativity while under traumas reign.
Within this notion of preservation lie adumbrations of the deathliness
of literary production, and one approach to the subject passes through
Bollas own comments on obsession and repetition. Still nursing the
binarism of free and unfree, Bollas confides that:
Psychoanalysts come across many people who lack the unconscious freedom
necessary for creative living. Their freedom is restricted, their mind bound in
anguished repetitions that terminate the dissemination of the self.
This obstruction to freedom is easily observed in the person who is
obsessed.14
While the citizens of the demos engaged in creative living fulfil them-
selves through disburdened expressions of self, the poor, banausic crea-
tures debarred by their own psyches from such liberal favours languish
amid immovable terminal repetitions (I put it in these terms because
a reading through of Cracking Up leads one to suspect Bollas of the
naively liberalist agenda also sustaining Enduring Love). Bollas obser-
vations return us to our central question: to put it bluntly, does a repeti-
tion terminate? Repetition presents a force of continuity, so to charge it
with the opposite force of termination is to raise some questions.
To elaborate them, let us resume our reading of Freud. Several terms
are now vibrating together: creativity (especially literary creativity),
repetition, termination (death), obsession. We are not sure repetition
splits off so readily and so early from creativity, or that the deathliness
and vitalism respectively underpinning them can simply be made oppo-
sites. Bollas, for instance, appears to hypostasise his terms into ideal

values, whereby creativity, life and freedom foster the Good; repetition,
termination and unfreedom, the Bad. Freud too appears to keep things
apart or, more precisely, the work done in Creative Writers and
Day-Dreaming (1908 [1907]) never gets updated in the light of later
writings, such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which con-
found the opposition between life and death. But even in texts roughly
contemporary with it, arguments are made which should unsettle or at
least revise the creativity sketched out in Creative Writers . . ..
Take obsession. Is creativity not obsessive? Of course if we go by
Christopher Bollas, obsession is the mortal enemy of creativity:
Pathological obsession is aimed at maintaining a terminal object that ends

all unconscious use of the object: ideational, affective, somatic, or
transferential.15
That obsession is bad is beyond debate, but in the paradoxical phrase,

maintaining a terminal object that ends, our ambiguity resurfaces. The
struggle between maintenance and termination, sustainment and ending,
continues unabated, itself interminable. Bollas describes in this context
a patient who for years keeps up a moan about her husband, obsessed
with his shortcomings: the husband is the terminal object she main-
tains. Clearly the woman has tapped a source of productive energy,
and who is to adjudicate what kind of value it has? Is this not also an
enduring love? And why would creative works not be terminal objects
that have kept their creator coming back obsessively to address and add
to them?
In Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), Freud begins
by reviving his earlier definition of obsessive actions as
transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and

which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in
childhood.16
So much for that: now he wants to make some amendments. In keeping

with the theory of disguise and distortion in the slightly earlier Creative
Writers . . . essay, Freud moves to mix ellipsis into the constitution of
obsession, for the technique of distortion by ellipsis seems to be typical
of obsessional neurosis.17 On the next page Freud adds the perhaps
surprising qualification that in obsessional neuroses the unconscious
mental processes occasionally break through into consciousness in their
pure and undistorted form, but by and large he wishes now to log
ellipsis among obsessions specifications.
The amendment written in, obsession only comes the more to look like

116 Death-Drive
creative writing. Where the literary impulse issues in the covert and dis-
torted presentation of a forbidden libidinal pleasure, obsession performs
elliptical stagings of repressed infantile sexuality. The difference hardly
rings out. They are, moreover, equally formal. Recall, this was already
an aspect of literary creation in Creative Writers . . .; and Freud, though
he does not emphasise this aspect of obsession in Notes Upon a Case
of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), has already based another whole essay
around it. Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)18 derived
from the insight that the two phenomena discussed share a ceremonious
formality; both are disciplines which as such observe certain rules. In
fact all three obsession, religion and literature possess such vestimen-
tary traits, the dressed-up, disciplined, artificial and coded tropings of a
repressed sexuality. But despite the clear structural sameness that spans
from obsessive action and religious practices to creative writing, Freud
leaves it unsaid. Is he trying to protect something?
A further, more enigmatic element in the consanguinity of these forms
takes the name of repetition, and in this we make another step towards
the death instincts. Freud establishes the repetitiousness in religious
practices and obsessive actions alike:
Any activities whatever may become obsessive actions in the wider sense of
the term if they are elaborated by small additions or given a rhythmic charac-
ter by means of pauses and repetitions. We shall not expect to find a sharp
distinction between ceremonials and obsessive actions.19
One can easily picture the apparatus of the Eucharist, for example,
with its prescribed duties and utterances, its rhythmic programme and
automatic pattern, and see in it the institutionally approved version
of neurotic behaviour obsessed with ritual, with laying things out, with
formulaic words, with special clothing, etc. But we should take care
in applying this model to literary forms, for a distinction applies, in
respect of them, between a writers activities and the writing produced.
Although we can just as readily imagine the writer going through a set
procedure before commencing work (washing the hands, unplugging
the phone, making coffee, repeating words of private exhortation, etc.),
Freuds earlier recognition of the role of aesthetic form directs us, in
turn, towards the written. This is not to say the writer might not also be
an obsessional neurotic who indulges in superstitious preparations, nor
that his or her choice of form the sonnet, say does not, if repeated,
provide a vehicle for personal obsession, but rather that . . .
I was about to say that when Freud indicates the formal aspect of
literary works, matters of genre are claiming his thoughts. But things are
more complex. Lets stick with sonnets. Although the sonnet constitutes

a public form, a genre, a certifiably literary mode, the writer who

employs it thereby makes it his or her own. Conversely, the written
sonnet and it can only ever be written equivocally remains public
even in its private appropriation by an author, precisely because it is a
form. And because it is a form it does not differ, fundamentally, from
any supposedly private ritual or form a writer may develop. Whether
stamped as literary or not by prevailing norms, the form a writer selects
will endlessly contest this privatepublic dilemma. Even the most eso-
teric form becomes, qua form, a repeatable event and, in this regard,
potentially public. Likewise, if an obsession, to satisfy its criterion of
repeatability, must solicit the formal, then it too suffers from the equiv-
ocation. Obsessive actions are no doubt personal they even serve to
ratify the alleged particularity of a given psyche but their repeatability
lends them a formal element which simultaneously takes them beyond
that psyches exclusive ownership. The more obsessive one becomes, the
more idiosyncratic, but also the more formal, the more theatrical, the
more imitable, the more public. Obsession plays host to this intractable
ambiguity, and insofar as the formal element of literary works may
and it always may be abused for personal obsessive ends, those works
will shelter the same ambiguity in their very form.
The impersonal side of repetitious and formal obsession emerges
in other works of Freud that deal with repetition proper. Earlier we
quoted from Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further
Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II) (1914), in
explaining the relation between repression and expression. We heard
Freud say that [t]he greater the resistance, the more extensively will
acting out (repetition) replace remembering.20 Now, as we have just
seen, such repetitions can become elaborate and ritualised, even to
the point of obsession. In fact, the greater the resistance or repression,
the greater or more extensive will the forms of expression become.
To the extent they express the repressed in complexified or custom-
ised form, such repetitions can claim to be original or creative (even
though, as we pointed out, that originality also evaporates through
their very repetitiousness, which confers a formality that renders them
standardised and public). But regardless of how bizarrely or originally
a repetition may evolve, regardless of how creative or idiosyncratic a
form it develops and even regardless of, by contrast, how standardised,
empty, public and borrowed the very same repetitions might always
become whatever the repetition is, it will always be intrinsically origi-
nal, creative or deviant, in that it begins in disguise and displacement.
Repetition is always already a trope. It tropes a wish which constitution-
ally it can never imitate, for such blatant presentation of the wish has

118 Death-Drive
been forbidden, and repetition stems only from the prohibition. Never
could it be orthodox, taking up its task rather as heretical, alternative,
heterodox and always different from the repressed wish it tacitly porters
along. Coming back to our sonnets, the sheer fact of a writer electing
this literary form testifies in principle to a creative, original, eccentric or
novel impulse, because chances are the form marks or masks the repeti-
tion of a wish, and the wish has long been deviated from, following an
early obliquity. A repetition has to invent: not only will it have already
done so merely by not stating the repressed wish directly, but continues
to do so by settling on any literary form whatsoever. It doesnt matter if
the form itself is hackneyed or pristine. Both merely accommodate the
founding originality of a repetition, and neither affects it, thus making
new-fangled literary forms ironically redundant.
None of this yet deals with the aforementioned impersonality of rep-
etition, though it does touch on the grey area circumferenced by modern
conceptions of the literary. However else it may be characterised,
todays literary must meet the rival requirements to be both creative
and aesthetic. It has become a commonplace to note that, in demand-
ing creativity and originality of a literary work, modern expectations
reverse ancient, or at least medieval, ones which calculate the literariness
of a given work from its level of acknowledgement of earlier authorities,
thus its derivativeness. Because they seek, in addition to the original, to
exact the aesthetic from pretenders to literary honour, the expectations
can only seem unreasonable at first. At first, the inventively original and
the generically formal (aesthetic) appear to be at odds. On closer scru-
tiny, as we have argued, they merge, and in the light of that scrutiny, we
may conjecture that the modern criteria for literariness give voice to an
unwitting demand for an object of undecidable status.
As for repetition proper, Freud has just given it the alternative name
of acting out ([t]he greater the resistance, the more extensively will
acting out (repetition) replace remembering). The concept of acting
out only amplifies the problems we are negotiating. Freud portrays the
activity in the following terms:
The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and
repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action;
he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.21
Something mechanical manipulates the patient. A kind of robotic

behaviour occurs, whence the impersonality of repetition but also
the opposite. A psychic programming dictates the patients actions but,
being psychic, the programming occupies the most private chamber
of the personality, its sanctum of authenticity, so to speak, even as it

commands these most inauthentic, dispossessed, absurd and puppet-like

motions. A highly compromised being appears before us, disporting its
unique personality in the contradictory mode of unstoppable autopoetic
repetitions which seem to come from some anonymous factory of ges-
tures. The unconscious is at work, in short. In witnessing its dramaturgy
we revisit the dialectic of formality and obsession, only in more alienated
aspect. Nothing if not repetitious, acting out too achieves formalisation,
even to the point of turning its victims into automata; yet, in an agonis-
ing paradox, it remains their pathology. Repetition obdurately nurtures
the internecine twins of private and public, authentic and mechanical,
natural and technological, even human and inhuman.
Our affiliated concern was with the possibility or otherwise of think-
ing a form, of bringing anything conscious or original to bear upon
the aesthetic form through which creativity demonstrates itself. In the
aesthetic form of the sonnet, the creative effort at appropriating it and
colouring it with originality triggered a proportionate expropriation.
Subduing a form to conscious, original, thinking, intentional, personal
control proved to be possible only to the extent it was also impos-
sible. In acting out, the mediating, humanising, thinking moment of
remembering gets bypassed, repetition rudely thrusts itself forward,
a shell hollowed out of thought and intention. As with those of the
obsessive, the actions played out, no matter how flagrant or contrived,
will not be caught, normalised and translated into conscious psychic
language, as it were. They press into the world uncouth. Not that in
both acting out and obsession, some naked trauma gets pushed on
stage: on the contrary, obsession depends, as we have seen, on ellipti-
cal figurations, just as the repetition in acting out repeats not a trauma
per se but the form of its first reactive, disguised repression (though
in the quotation above Freud has relaxed his rigour on this point).
It is these convoluted repetitions which their subject fails to think or
remember in any cognisant fashion, despite their conspicuous weird-
ness. The logic of it even suggests that the odder the behaviour, the
less noticeable to its subject which can only be because the form
counts more than the content. In other words, the logic supports
itself with the truism that the patient the subject, the obsessive,
the priest, the creator, the writer ceases to apprehend what he or
she repeats. Repetition can make a normality of the most aberrant or
recondite actions, the form having either numbed all apperception of
the content or, more interestingly, commuted each item of content into
a moment of itself a moment of form, that is. In the latter case, the
form of the Eucharist would pervade its contents, so that no word
(This is my body . . .) nor any item (chalice, wine, wafer, etc.) would

120 Death-Drive
represent a content distinguishable from the formal make-up of the

ceremony; and in the case of the sonnet, not only would the shape of
the poem constitute form, obviously enough, but so would each line,
as if susurrating I am the nth line of a sonnet, and even each word,
though varying from sonnet to sonnet and thus creating the impression
of content, might be heard to whisper, I am the nth word in the nth
line of a sonnet . . .
But perhaps formal elements cannot be thought. Worse than merely
becoming dulled and negligible through repetition, forms, such as aes-
thetic forms, may be impossible to think tout court. Acting out might
describe the general as much as the pathological condition of repetition.
Perhaps its not merely possible to repeat without understanding, but
necessary: repetition kicks in where the understanding falters. We repeat
because we do not understand. Thus formal elements win their aesthetic
quality by overleaping their creators cognitive mediation of them. After
all, such mediation spells their death. Literary form becomes, techni-
cally, unthinkable. And when it opts for such a form, the creative act
turns into the thoughtless facilitation of a cosmetic object, literariness
the effect of suppressing reflection on it.
Though all this makes for a somewhat scandalous theory of creativity,
nothing in it disputes the basic proposition that creativity does indeed
create. Where there was nothing, now there is something. Even when
create really means re-create, the re-creations fill an erstwhile gap.
Even though the creativity falls short of its former freedom and inten-
tionality, nevertheless literary and other aesthetic works are created: in
the absence of untrammelled creativity, creations still arise. I want to
come back to the nothingness that precedes a creative act, but for now
the sheer thereness of a so-called creative repetition demands some
comment. How did it come to be there? We have exposed the perplexi-
ties of its production, the trajectory from wish to repression to deceiv-
ing representation, etc., but not substantially interrogated what makes
creative repetitions happen.
To enjoy the fruit of Freuds own reflections on this question, we must
consult a new source, further on again in the chronology of his essays. In
The Uncanny (1919) Freud deepens the character of repetition, intro-
ducing a phrase, compulsion to repeat, which bears a significance well
beyond the essays topic:
It is possible to recognise the dominance in the unconscious mind of a com-

pulsion to repeat proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably
inherent in the very nature of the instincts a compulsion powerful enough
to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their
daemonic character.22

A compulsion to repeat, then, in the middle of this extraordinarily

thought-provoking statement. We are now in the immediate neighbour-
hood of death. Why are repetitions made? Because of a compulsion.
We already knew there was a wish and that it industriously found ways
sometimes very roundabout ways of gratifying itself in repetitions,
and that literary works number among these. Now we also know what
drives it, to wit: compulsion.
Painful to say, the notion of compulsion both does and does not
further our understanding of the wish as the instrument of the pleasure
principle. On the one hand, compulsion takes us further into the psyche,
beyond the mere psychology of the wish, into the archaic and, as Freud
will later contend, phylogenetic nest of the instincts. From this point of
view the compulsion to repeat becomes almost visceral in its function-
ing, as hard to arrest by conscious will as a heartbeat. On the other hand,
since it is a wish that pilots repetition, compulsion has already been
factored in, for a wish is arguably self-compelling by nature. As wishful,
the wish knows nothing but motivation, solicitation, identification and
so on, incapable of rest. The wish does nothing but compel itself.
Either way whether it precedes or accompanies the wish , there is
compulsion. At this stage in Freuds career (1919), we can say no more; he
hasnt yet advanced an explanation for the compulsion at hand. Insofar
as literary and other aesthetic works provide the formal receptacles for
repetitions, they too will have been compelled. The wish had to have its
way, its compulsive energy relentless in the pursuit of a compromised
way round repression. It repeats itself, misunderstood by its agent, in
forms which though diverse aesthetic, obsessive, religious, acting out
enjoy a structural affinity, and it goes on repeating itself, never visiting
the consciousness which might find the lever to shut it down. Once again
it would be arbitrary to call such energy either creative or oppressively
monotonous. As in the case of Jed Parry in McEwans novel, it is both.
Compulsion offers a more powerful concept than either the creativity or
the monotony it may interpretatively be split into.
Freuds explanation of it arrives in the text that has been our golden
thread throughout this book, that published the following year, Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920). So far we have conceived repetitions,
particularly of the aesthetic variety, as the far-flung, elaborated or dis-
seminative sallies from a repressed wish that has been condensed and
displaced: distance inheres in them. The 1920 paper indirectly adjusts
this conception. The compulsion to repeat now serves, as we know, a
need to restore an earlier state of things.23 This might prima facie look
like Hanna Segals impulse [. . .] to recover and recreate [a] lost world
(see above), especially given the imprecision of that word impulse. But

122 Death-Drive
where Segal identifies a psychological anteriority, Freuds attentions

have turned again, as in The Uncanny (1919), to the antepsychological
realm of the instincts. The earlier state is much earlier, in short. For all
its diversifications and satellites, all the apparent remoteness of its forms,
repetition always steers a homeward course towards the instincts. The
regionality of its expressions is false. Whatever distance they pretend
to have travelled has always already bent back to a prior, nearer loca-
tion, the innermost of the mind. Indeed the innerness is so inwards it
has backed through the individual psyche into a phylogenetic past. The
intrepid creativity of repetitions could not be more conservative.
In this conservatism lies the kernel of Freuds conception. As it seeks
at large the pleasure on which to sate itself (often obliged to light on
pathological forms as removed from it as literary works), the wish actu-
ally craves the alleviation of tension which pleasure affords. Freuds
essay opens summarily with:
In the theory of psychoanalysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the

course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure prin-
ciple. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably
set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such
that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with
an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.24
Armed thus with his theory, Freud feels emboldened to make the infer-
ence that the pleasure principle serves the death instincts, for the state
of absolute tranquillity sought from pleasure amounts to the inertia
of death. Freud likens it to the extinction of a Buddhist nirvana. And
insofar as the death instincts therefore lord it over the pleasure principle,
they converge with the compulsion to repeat which, as Freud noted in
The Uncanny (1919) (see above), is a compulsion powerful enough
to overrule the pleasure principle. The deathliness of repetition reveals
itself at last.
It might be tempting to try and capture Freuds schema in the net of
a dialectic, but this would be vain. Repetition tilts between the creative
and the monotonous. Impressively creative or flamboyant in its choice of
forms, forms which in principle may be as orchidaceous and aesthetic as
you like, repetition nevertheless drags along the same old wish repressed.
Is there a dialectic of identity and difference here? I think not. For a start,
any such dialectic could at best be secondary, considering that, as we
remarked before, repetitions start off as inventive, coming into exist-
ence as improvisatory salvos and, in that, remaining inventive, whatever
takes place down the line, sameness or variation. But more gravely, the
mastery of the death instincts subsumes any dialecticity in the play of

repetition into its own overarching, monolithic and irresistible force.

Pleasures station is not as a partner-in-identity-and-difference for the
death instincts, but as its servant. And if that makes us rush to Hegel to
help us say that, well, if pleasure is the servant of death, and death is
pleasures lord, then the dialectic of power described in Phenomenology
of Spirit has reappeared . . ., we should pause. For death and pleasure to
join together in the pas-de-deux of a dialectic, they would have to dance
to the same measure. The absolute contemporaneity of the two partners
sustains all dialectical substitution; there is no time-difference in dialec-
tics. Not only are both partners quite present to each other, but dialectics
consists in the effort to comprehend their simultaneity. Death and pleas-
ure, by contrast, inhabit either a dyschronic field, or separate eras which
touch. As we noted, the death instincts recede into an archaic past, which
Freud now identifies as that of the simple organism. The wish, and the
pleasure principle that governs it, bear an anachronistic relation to the
death instincts, as the rebeginning, now in the human species, of an urge
for stillness under the more perspicuous superstructure of the psyche.
A kind of aesthetic double-time develops. No matter the psychical
vestments worn by aesthetic repetitions, no matter, that is, how expres-
sively they belong to the time of an individual psyche how far they are
the accents of its very modernity the shadow of an ancient deathliness
falls over them. The inaccessible wake of death, both in time and out
of time, conditions the aesthetic present while staying ulterior to it. At
the very least, the situation restages the problem of the non-individual
character of the psyche. Its not just that forms creatively elected by the
individual psyche refuse to be subjugated by the private consciousness,
but that the death which lays its moon-like light over them ushers them
into a past of inassimilable otherness and generality. This older time of
the aesthetic object pulls it into at best a phylogenetic ancestry which,
though badged as metapsychological, has little to do with psychologi-
cal continuity, and at worst a nameless organicism. But even if we disre-
gard such Freudian arcana, the aesthetic object still snags on a temporal
split that prevents its ideal presence-to-self.
Before taking these Freudianisms forward to consider more spe-
cifically literary questions, particularly as generated by Leo Bersani
and Jacques Derrida from their reading of Freud, let us head off some
potential confusion and do so by drawing again on Timothy Clark.
Eliciting the implications for creativity of Nietzsches notion of the
Dionysian, Clark writes that:
Dionysian creativity, freed from the service of higher values, and become
its own end and object, forms a notion of self-creation and re-creation that is,

124 Death-Drive
necessarily, also continuously annihilating. Ultimately, it is indistinguishable

from a transgressive death-drive: The genius in his works, in his deeds is
necessarily a prodigal: his greatness lies in the fact that he expends himself . . .
The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended. [Nietzsche]25
Two remarks here. First: the transgressive death-drive and [t]he
instinct of self-preservation are taken to be adversaries. No doubt
this agrees with common sense, but in Freud the pair are not only not
hostile, they are intrinsically at one. The Freudian death-drive aims at
just such preservation, by warding off exterior threat, including the
threat which pleasure, as an experience of agitation, presents; only if
it secures its own relief will pleasure be countenanced. Death-drive
is something of a misnomer for this function. Preservation drive or
reduction drive would be more apposite. The Freudian death-drive
warrants the adjective annihilating only to the limited degree that (1) it
carries in its undertow a pleasure principle that smothers or deflects any-
thing disturbing the psychic placidity it protects; (2) it sets its sights on
such pared-down placidity, wooing a near-nothing, though strictly this
speaks less of a nihilism on its part than a metapsychological minimal-
ism which sparks a methodological crisis over where to halt the regress
of placidity (Freud resorts to recalibrating it at the degree almost-zero
of the simple organism). Perversely, the death-drive works on behalf of
perpetuity, not destruction, and a perpetuity extending both backwards
and forwards in time: backwards because a prehistoric past irresistibly
beckons it, forwards because perpetual. Nothing in Freud really dies: it
either lies dormant or what amounts to the same thing reintegrates
and survives through the hugely powerful processes of memory and
memorialisation, processes in which annihilation or pure loss are never
allowed to tear holes.
Second: the meaning of death as perpetuity welds it to notions of
creation. Both death-drive and wish hiddenly buzz with the concen-
trated energy of continuance, like a sun in eclipse, providing the source
of all creative activity. Such energy for creation is a far cry from that
trumpeted by Nietzsche, who credits a psychological self-determinism
as the ground of creativity that will be denied the Freudian writer. The
latter finds him- or herself dwarfed by a metapsychological cosmos, any
personal psychology, even where it manages some self-determinism, ren-
dered ineffectual by the chthonic imperatives of death manoeuvring it.
We shall do well to remember the meta- or post-psychological phase
of psychoanalysis as we begin our descent towards the literary. But nor
ought we so peremptorily to dismiss Nietzsche from the discussion.
The genius in his works, in his deeds is necessarily a prodigal: his
greatness lies in the fact that he expends himself . . . The instinct of self-

preservation is as it were suspended: genius might prove an equally

fruitful term with which to configure the literary, but the notion of
prodigality or expenditure is what we shall take up. Let us straightaway
put it into tension with a remark concerning the death-drive made by
Jacques Derrida:
According to a schema that never ceased to guide Freuds thought, the move-
ment of the trace is described as an effort of life to protect itself by deferring
the dangerous investment, by constituting a reserve (Vorrat).26
It is all a question of how much energy, psychic or otherwise, gets used

by creativity, and where it comes from. In Nietzsche, the (creative)
genius expends himself, suggesting cavalier self-destruction, but the
expenditure is temporary or recoverable, and therefore phoney, each
frenzied outpouring only a petit mort which can bank on being replen-
ished. Despite its kamikaze recklessness, such psychic orgasm contains
itself within what Derrida would call a restricted economy, that of the
individual mind; we should have to go to Nietzsches theories of history
to see daylight within this otherwise closed system. Derrida specifically
lays the charge of restricted economy at Freuds door, and it informs
the quotation above. In emphasising the reserve built by the Freudian
psyche, Derrida wants to indict the latter for a self-recuperating ideal-
ity (along similar lines as his critique of Hegelian dialectics, inter alia).
In this view, Freudian expenditure would also be phoney. As we were
saying, no loss worth the name inheres in the so-called death-drive.
And yet the Freudian psyche achieves less continuity with itself than
Derrida would have it. Derridas sureness of the homogeneity of the
(Freudian) psychic dimension in which detours are made fails to account
for the possible or quasi-heterogeneity of its phylogenetic past, which,
as we noted, causes a temporal rift and a concomitant loss of psychic
presence-to-self. Interestingly, this does not prevent Derrida from
envisioning a similar conclusion reached via a different route. He asks:
How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, diffrance as the eco-
nomic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back
to the pleasure or presence that have been deferred by (conscious or uncon-
scious) calculation, and, on the other hand, diffrance as the relation to an
impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of
presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as
the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy?27
As far as Freudian psychology goes, Derridas construction of the eco-

nomic detour calls for no objection. But it appears to us that diffrance
as the relation to an impossible presence already troubled the Freudian

126 Death-Drive
psyche in the form of its own phylogenetic that is, metapsychological

debt. True, the metapsychological diffrance (if we can call it that)
of the Freudian death instinct does not function expressly does not
function as expenditure without reserve, [. . .] the irreparable loss of
presence, the irreversible usage of energy, but then Derridas courting of
so refined an absence looks as idealised as the psychic totality he wishes
to disaggregate. On the other hand, metapsychological diffrance,
even if it pertains to an extrapsychic energy (that of phylogenetics) and
thereby pollutes the homogeneity of the psychic dimension, pertains to
an absent form that will have been present and has therefore never
been impossible.
It is important to exempt the radical vacuity inscribed in Derridean
diffrance from any talk of nihilism or annihilation such as we have
been party to. If the alleged nihilism in Nietzsche rather fed the creative
faculty than killed it, all the more so in Derrida where diffrance, at first
sight so privative, is gifted with an almost transcendental generativity.
By stymieing presence, diffrance allows it to break from itself and go
forward, to defer itself by differing from itself: that is, become temporal-
ised. Time has to deconstruct itself, lose itself to keep itself. The very pos-
sibility of presence of all that is depends upon its own cancellation,
revealing diffrance as the most productive force conceivable. So when
Derrida, in the second half of his sentence (on the other hand, diffrance
as the relation to an impossible presence [. . .]) brings in the death-drive
(expenditure without reserve, [. . .] the irreparable loss of presence,
the irreversible usage of energy, that is, [. . .] the death instinct), an
extremely ambivalent phenomenon emerges. If the death-drive answers
to diffrance, its economic interfuses with an aneconomic, character.
Instead of the death-drive merely colluding with the pleasure principle
(and the reality principle) in a system which postpones pleasure in order
to reclaim it later, thereby achieving an overall balance, now that system
has a bug in it which impedes its (economic) closure, and thus even the
possibility of balance. The bug is diffrance which enjoins upon the
presence of the present-pleasure-to-be-deferred an absolute loss in prin-
ciple. The (present) pleasure may indeed be recouped later but only after
exiting the system altogether (nor waiting in the sidelines in some virtual
system either), and only as incomplete even then. We are beyond all
expenditure here. But that same loss will also, through a kind of ultimate
risk, create the conditions for all deferral and continuation. Diffrance
has the peculiar ability to be generative in lieu of any reserve from
which to generate: but then having no reserve also means observing no
limit. In one respect, diffrance is absolute creativity.
In this Derridean view, the death-drive succeeds in an affirmative

productivity sorely lacking, in the eyes of many commentators, in its

Freudian configuration. Witness Leo Bersani:
What has been repressed from the speculative second half of Freuds text
[Beyond the Pleasure Principle] is sexuality as productive masochism. The
possibility of exploiting the shattering effects of sexuality in order to main-
tain the tensions of an eroticised, de-narrativised, and mobile consciousness
has been neglected, or refused, in favour of a view of pleasure as nothing
more than the reduction of all tension and the evacuation of all
excitement.28
Bersanis appeal, powered it seems by a belated Nietzscheanism of its

own, for a sexuality as productive masochism, raises the good question
of why indeed Freud does not permit the death instinct to profit from
the energy of the masochism it resembles. I examined that question in
the Chapter 3 above, A Subject is Being Beaten; here we want to get on
board Bersanis relocating of it in the context of the literary (his reading
of Beyond the Pleasure Principle has been inspired by that of Derrida
whose initiative it was to track the strategies of the texts movement).29
For Bersani something else is going on in Freuds description of the
death-drive, rather different from our ideas of aesthetic form, that relates
profoundly to the literary and concerns precisely its productivity.
For Bersani, a special energy crackles behind the death-drive, which
Freud is remiss in overlooking. Its character is erotic, and Bersani finds
fault with Freud for compacting it into its own antonym, the evacuation
of all excitement. Bersani then augments his position: not by extrapo-
lating or refuting Freudian concepts, but by tracing the contours of
Freuds rhetoric. He believes the hesitations, solecisms and vaguenesses
in Freuds text are the symptoms of this other energy, and he treats them
as exemplary, no less, of the general functioning of literary language. He
proposes that:
The linguistic categories of pleasure, reality, sexuality, and death can, at the
most, be related to, or inferred from or correspond to [Bersani here
mocking Freuds logical and terminological imprecision in Beyond . . .] a
certain type of insistence in consciousness which it is the function of linguistic
articulation to miss. And we should perhaps recognise in what, with neces-
sary imprecision, has been called literary language the intrusion of these
insistent, silent, productively mistaken replications into a texts line of lan-
guage. These replications can be verbally rendered only by such events as the
sliding of the word pleasure in Freuds text, or the indeterminate placing of
sexuality in the instinctual conflict between life and death.30
The more vulnerable language becomes to the intrusion of these insist-

ent, silent, productively mistaken replications, the more literary. The

128 Death-Drive
intrusion evidences an eroticised deathliness which knows only such

mistaken replications as a means of propagating itself into the phe-
nomenal and aesthetic world. Ironically, language approaches literari-
ness the more it divests itself of articulacy, its growing maladroitness the
outward sign of a culture of erotic death parasitically besieging it from
within. The literary comprises telling lacunae created by the absence to
articulation of sex and death which nevertheless indelibly underwrite the
literary process. Literature is an effect of the withdrawn presence of the
death-drive.
Promising though these suggestions are, we should withhold full
approval, for they might only rehabilitate what E. R. Curtius has clas-
sified as literatures inexpressibility topoi.31 Literariness in Bersanis
perspective still trades on the illusion of an inexpressible presence: as he
insists, it is the function of linguistic articulation to miss these thana-
tographic incursions. The ineffable is present to the extent it cannot
be presented. Though Bersani reinvents the literary as its incompetent
vessel rather than its technically skilful or artistic formalisation, the
ineffable signified still reigns supreme, and that incompetence under
the sway of an importunate writing force (the death instincts) makes
Bersanis design look like another form of automatic writing.
Despite Bersanis exasperation with, and revision of, Freud, the inac-
cessible repetitiousness of death in literary form, and the possibility that
literature repeats nothing, remain in broad accordance with the masters
views. As with Freud, no room exists in the literary artifact for content.
To be more precise, content has significance only, at bottom, as a form
or mode of the death-drive, and in this regard the literary says nothing,
it never posits for itself, it just lets the death-drive drive it (where it does
say something, it gives over being literary). Which puts a new spin on an
oft-cited remark of Derridas concerning literature: The space of litera-
ture is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution
which in principle allows one to say everything.32 From time to time
literature might run up against censorship, but external constraint will
not vitiate its principle in the right to say everything. Fictive by birth,
literature abounds in an ignorance of all boundaries to the sayable. And
by extension, it need never posit anything. Yes, it may do so a liter-
ary work may incorporate positive data, empirical description, factual
information, and so on but it never has to; it is just as literary, even
more so, when it dispenses with positive statements.33 Free of the obliga-
tion to posit, literature intrinsically says nothing. In other words, saying
nothing and the licence to say everything amount to the same.
So much for productivity when all that gets produced are sweet noth-
ings. Bersani ends up reinstating the emptiness he decried in Freud.

Though he salvages the tension of unrelieved eros from the death-drive,

and exhorts it to destabilise linguistic processes the more to make them
literary, what results are deathly gaps in articulation, as aphasic and
dumb as they are salutary and vital. In a very general sense this might
supply the masochism Bersani petitions for, but is hardly productive
in any redoubtable way. Besides, there never was a contradiction in
Freud, as we have seen, between creativity and death.
On the subject of masochism, let us remind ourselves that although the
death instincts permeate the literary artifact to its superficial core, it feels
no pain. Quite the reverse. In our reading of Freud, literary form and
what would a literature without form be? perpetrates a repetitiousness
that defensively keeps all upset at a minimum equivalent to pleasure (or
at least its effect). The deportment of the literary, its style, is apotropaic
by nature: the style protects as much as it adorns, its flamboyant garb
also an armour (indeed the word ornament comes from a Latin source
meaning armour). This dual aspect of literary style receives its subtlest
rendition in a Derridean text on Nietzsche that alludes everywhere to
Freud. Elliptical itself, Derridas essay compresses thus the features of
literary style:
In the question of style there is always the weight or examen of some pointed
object. At times this object might be only a quill or a stylus. But it could just
as easily be a stiletto, or even a rapier. Such objects might be used in a vicious
attack against what philosophy appeals to in the name of matter or matrix,
an attack whose thrust could not but leave its mark, could not but inscribe
there some imprint or form. But they might also be used as protection against
the threat of such an attack, in order to keep it at a distance, to repel it as
one bends or recoils before its force, in flight, behind veils and sails (des
voiles). But let us leave this elytron to float between the masculine and the
feminine.34
Literary style averts the philosophical matter or matrix. Working com-

plementarily to diffrance in its perforation of the present pleasure,
the literary stiletto inserts the distance of a diffrance-like loss that
Derrida will later redescribe in terms of castration. As we were at pains
to stress, the loss pertains to no entity; the distance defers no plenary
pleasure; no secret essence hides in the background; no transcenden-
tal signified or ineffable presence of the ilk rehearsed by Bersani. In
its gesture, style attacks as it defends, masculine in its femininity
though the metaphorical value of these terms breaks down in a schema
devoid of the essence, truth or literalism in which metaphor might refind
its origin. Hence the elytron floats.
As in Freud, literary style consists in the forces of pleasure and
pain, principally in the mode of their own deferral, except that Derrida

130 Death-Drive
appears to rule out any sensuous, psychological or metapsychological

affect such forces bore in their Freudian format. Lacking any entity or
origin to displace, style is nothing but pure deferral or distance, which
is as much to say as style is nothing. Crucially, however, that nothing
has a form in the literal instrumentality of the style, and its divorced
supplementarity to the psyche. Its less that Derrida rules out the sensu-
ous, psychological or metapsychological affect, and more that he heeds
a break in the continuum from psyche to literary artefact, which seems
never to have occurred to Freud, despite the latters awareness of form.
Style is not the man, style is the style a graphic discontinuity in and
of the psyche, which curtails the latters absolute rule over the aesthetic
field it thought to have determined. That leaves space for the imple-
ments of style the quills, stilettos, rapiers and bodkins which Derrida
inventories to enact an automatism of their own. Creativity thus dis-
covers a new source. If style brings on the destruction, both offensive
and defensive, of the present pleasure it might have otherwise simply
deferred, that pleasure and the wish straining after it can no longer
support the forays of literary practice as they did in Freud. Literary style
avails itself of a post-psychical independence. But in so doing, style also
crashes, for where it was wont to vouch for the singularity of both its
author and itself through the medium of a psychical conduit back to
that author, now the psychical reference-point has gone and with it the
chance of style staving itself into some singularity. Style, the voice of
singularity, has turned plural and lost its style.
Through Derrida we have encountered a second demand to loosen
the literary from its too humanistic or post-Romantic moorings, iden-
tify energies of creativity other than those of the individual psyche, and
thus tolerate what is separate or alien about the literary. It may be that
the literary indeed any creative work deserves to be called aesthetic
only when it has seceded from psychical ordnance. In the first view, by
looking into Freuds notion of aesthetic form, we saw the literary mutate
from private to public and develop separate status. Albeit pathologi-
cal in origin, the literary adopted a form that necessarily took it away
from pathology, according to a logic which Freud, being committed to
the universality of psyche, could not entertain. For Freud literary style
defers a pleasure and a pain within a psychical dimension that is more
or less homogeneous, depending on how far phylogenetics belongs to it;
for Derrida literary style defers something more radical, the very condi-
tion of possibility of pleasure, namely presence. Such is the destruction
that precedes creation that we mentioned above. In both cases (though
of the two only Derrida would assent) style breaks free. And although
Freud does not address style per se, it falls to the same logic. Aesthetic

forms are forms of repetition, as we showed, which led to their inde-

pendence. The same goes for literary style. Style needs to be repeated
to become identifiable as such. A style that happens only once has not
yet become a style. In repeating itself style is already becoming a form,
and, like a form, becoming susceptible to expropriation. Long before
any Derridean analysis of it, style suffers from the paradox in ownership
and singularity. Artifacts of style are again only as creative as they are
monotonous.
But we cannot leave it at that. We must not confuse the separateness
of the literary artifact with a discrete, bordered, framed unity: it may be
independent, but it isnt enclosed. Freud talks about forms, the empiri-
cism of which could easily stop us thinking through the implications of
expropriation. In principle, a literary artifact even of the most integral
empirical form (the sonnet again!) will have had to jeopardise its singu-
larity through becoming public, a process which distorts and ruins it; it
will have given itself away in the most disseminative fashion in order
to win itself back in tidy, consensual shape. In Derrida it gets worse,
because no empiricism comes along to validate this or that aesthetic
object. With the literary stylus causing rents in the fabric of presence, all
form as the collected moments of aesthetic presence becomes impos-
sible. There may be an aesthetic territory for the literary but it no longer
coincides with any empirical boundary, especially where that boundary
corresponds to an authors psyche, for the literary takes off from the
excision of all psychism. The space of literature extends chaotically in
all directions, flouting the borders between one psyche and the next, one
author and the next, making style the property of the force of writing
itself, and preventing us from matching it conclusively to the form of
any aesthetic (empirical) object, literary or otherwise (the classification
literary has no more distinctness than any other).
Whichever way you look at it, the literary implements deferral. A
certain obliquity, and therefore a certain temporality, a certain strat-
egism, a certain rhetoric, carry it ever wayward. In this respect, even
Freud and Derrida uphold a tradition. True, Freud adjudges literary
artifacts to have risen above the pathologies touching them and saturat-
ing other formal practices, but as we have seen, it is arbitrary to do
so: the literary is just as perverse as those other practices. And Derrida
will elsewhere release the viral energy of the literary into the sanitised
space of philosophy, causing philosophy to express a secret delinquency
the literary always flaunted but the literary is still seen as delinquent.
Both Freud and Derrida keep the literary in its Platonic place as unor-
thodox and abnormal, even though they appear to overturn the Platonic
evaluation of the literary as bad. It is indisputably errant.

132 Death-Drive
The trouble is, its own errancy too often incites the persecution of the
literary back to an origin, to counter the authority of this thing which
in speaking so much, and ever more copiously, still says nothing and
indeed gains its authority from this allusive emptiness. Like death, the
literary is all the more powerful for creating the illusion of a substance
or content it can never adduce. And indeed such mystificatory author-
ity cannot simply be accepted. The drifting verbosity of the literary has
nothing to do with babble, however, or stream of consciousness, for
its drift, its errancy, its obliquity and ellipses are made up of formal ele-
ments, like gaudy jewellery. In the becoming-formal lies the element of
the literarys power, but the formalisation does not bring rectitude; it
like an ideological apparatus, institutes an aberration. This aberration is
dressed up as everything, but is nothing. Repeat: nothing.
Notes
1. SE, IX, p. 144.
2. Ibid., p. 146.
3. Ibid., p. 153.
4. Ibid., p. 150.
5. SE, XII, p. 151.
6. Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of
Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 2.
7. Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London and New York: Tavistock/
Routledge, 1991), p. 94. The quotation comes from a chapter which con-
siders Freuds Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.
8. Ibid., p. 86.
9. Ibid., p. 82.
11. Ibid., p. 9.
12. Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience
(London: Routledge, 1995), p. 5.
13. On p. 155 Bollas develops the point: If the ego appreciates the individuals
sense, then there is an intrasubjective sensitivity; I think that poets, paint-
ers, musicians, and others engaged in creative work feel pleasure in their
egos contribution to this separate sense [. . .] Creativity in unconscious
work responds to any audience delegated by the self.
14. Ibid., p. 71.
15. Ibid., p. 78.
16. SE, X, p. 221.
17. Ibid., p. 227.
18. SE, IX, pp. 11527.
19. Ibid., p. 118.

20. See note 5 above.

21. SE, XII, p. 150.
22. SE, XVII, p. 238.
23. SE, XVIII, p. 57.
24. Ibid., p. 3.
26. Jacques Derrida, Diffrance, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 18.
27. Ibid., p. 19.
28. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 634.
29. Jacques Derrida, To Speculate on Freud, in The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 257409.
30. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 66.
31. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,
trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), pp.
15962.
32. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. various
(New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 36.
33. For elaboration of this point, see my Licence, in Poetry and Politics, ed.
Kate Flint (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1996), pp. 14061.
34. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsches Styles/perons: Les Styles de Nietzsche,
trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1979), pp. 379.

Chapter 6
A Harmless Suggestion
There is nothing new under the sun. (Heraclitus)
So foul and fair a day I have not seen: Macbeths first words invoke,
from the start, a coextensiveness of benefit and harm that will domi-
nate the remainder of his foreshortened life. The day, a semi-objective
correlative for his own destiny, will be foul and fair in equal measure.
What will make him will also destroy him, giving him advantage only
to the degree that it scuppers him too. As Macbeth is magnified, so he
disintegrates, like a photographic blow-up.
Within seconds the Thane of Glamis finds himself swept into the
orbit of suggestion. The witches appear. The third witch cries, All hail,
Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter! Prophecy and suggestion hold
hands like witches, collusive and indistinguishable. Are the witches
revealing to Macbeth a truth, a transcendental knowledge of which they
are the medium, known out there in the cosmos but as yet undelivered
to Macbeth himself? Do we see here a trope or topos of revelation? Or,
by contrast, are the witches giving voice not to an exterior verity but
to Macbeths own inner thoughts? The witches might be Manichean
projections from Macbeths mind, hallucinations like that of the fantas-
matic dagger later on, or they might be independent or hired agents with
a remit to expose his secrets, but in either case the truth they announce
will not be new, not an invention but a discovery, a truth, therefore, that
lay already within Macbeth. So the question is: is the prophecy news to
Macbeth?
Much Macbeth scholarship, of course, has been exercised by this
question, to ascertain how far the witches merely express what Macbeth
was already wishing versus how far they plant the wish in his mind. Is
this new news to the Thane of Glamis or the old news of a repressed or
at least suppressed wish on his part? One cannot help thinking that
the question would have been resolved by now if it were resolvable. The

A Harmless Suggestion 135
question is not local to Macbeth, for it concerns the nature of prophecy;

the line, if there is one, between prophecy and suggestion; the relation-
ship between suggestion and the identity of the suggestible party; finally,
the connection between the power of suggestion and the suggestion of
power ideological temptations, as it were. These more general issues
are the ones I explore in what follows, and they all, as I shall try to
show, come down to the question of death. But as a preliminary salvo,
and in a challenge to the college of Macbeth scholars, let me first isolate
a prejudice.
The scholarly debate works on the prejudice or assumption that, be
Macbeth innocent or guilty of harbouring quietly the ambition broad-
cast so loud and clear by the witches, he nevertheless is there, in situ,
as its object or subject. A Macbeth-identity precedes the scene, albeit in
fictional form. This may be true, but it is worth testing, and not least
because of Macbeths own advertisement as to his undoing. Recall the
words he speaks the scene after his fateful encounter with the witches:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.1
These much-glossed lines say to me that in the wake of the weird sisters
appearance, speculation has so taken over from reality in Macbeths
mind that the substance of his experience has become insubstantial.
Only what is not, is. The opposite of is, the opposite of presence, being
or substance, has come to invade his every faculty, shaking his single
state of man. However, this opposite of is is not inexistence or death,
exactly. [W]hat is not works as a metaphor for the future as that realm
of the fantastical; since the future is not, by definition, its status is
speculative. Neither is there a present presence for Macbeth nor quite
a future presence, because that future, being future, cannot have such a
presence yet except through anticipation, and anticipation is incapable
of conferring substance upon it. Living neither in the present, because
he is too consumed by speculation, nor in the future, because the future
doesnt exist, Macbeth lives strangely out of time while completely
enslaved to its rule and paradoxes. He rides time from the outside, as if
clinging on, like De Quinceys pariah, to a stagecoach.
What results is a paralysis or inertia not dissimilar to that of Prince
Hamlet, whereby function / Is smothered in surmise, in a ghastly pre-
figuring of the nocturnal asphyxiation and stabbing of the king the
murder that yet is but fantastical. The physical and the metaphysical
parallel each other, but at a distance, with Macbeth trapped in the yoke

136 Death-Drive
between them, pulling them together and simultaneously pushing them

far apart. Paradoxically, the anticipation of action becomes the enemy
of action better then not to think or speculate at all because to do so
is to shake the single state of man, to smother function, and thus to put
ones being in peril. The more Macbeth anticipates the death of the other
(the king) the more he brings his own shaking, his own smothering his
own death, in effect closer to himself. Thus the speculative mutates
into its opposite, and creates a real threat. At one level, surmise,
speculation and anticipation will smother action by delaying it, but at
another where the word smothered connects Macbeth to Duncan,
just as the single state of man metaphor is unmistakeably monarchical,
alluding among other things to Duncans position as state incarnate in
a single man (monarchy) the action is already happening, and already
happening not to Duncan, but Macbeth himself. A complex interchange
of identity between the two parties operates in these lines even the
phrase what is not signifies Macbeth as king but in such a way as to
hint at death (is not), while the word is picks up on the is at the end
of the preceding line, which refers implicitly to Duncan (not to mention
the complication whereby shakes alludes to the author). Because key
words stand for both parties, Macbeth cannot refer to Duncans death
without referring to his own. More precisely, Macbeth refers to himself
as (the murdered) Duncan; he has only to refer to himself, therefore, to
multiply the risk to himself inordinately, suicide and murder matching
each other step for step. The action to which speculation leads backfires
upon its agent: speculation doesnt just smother action, it also pricks it
as Lady Macbeth will say, and pricks it in a pricking way, causing its per-
petrator harm. In short, surmise both postpones and expedites action,
but it also distorts the field it takes place in, causing uncontrollable and
hazardous reversals of identity.
That is the first reason for doubting the integrity of Macbeths identity,
but is only the tip of the iceberg: it derives from a more primary reason
that goes back to the scene of prophecy and suggestion with the witches,
which derives in turn from a wish. The origin of Macbeths dangerous
surmise lay with the witches prophecy. By the time he speaks the lines
just quoted the prophecy has been framed as Macbeths thought My
thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical. The thought contains a
picture of Macbeth as king in Duncans place, though as we have said it
remains an open question whether the witches gave him that picture or
whether he already possessed it. Being the force that impels the confu-
sion of metaphors and identities in Macbeths speech, that thought has
more power than either. As a thought and as a picture it holds itself as
it were suspended or pinned up over the stage throughout, a kind of

grotesque mandala in which Macbeth has cannibalised Duncan but is

only half digesting him. And it is important we acknowledge this as a
thought-picture, as an image of false accession, one that has been pro-
jected by the play above the play, for doing so helps separate Macbeth
as a protagonist from this other force which hauls him along, this image
that transfixes him and makes of him mere matter.
But further, the thought and its image crystallise a wish the wish
to be king whose trajectory merits perhaps more than the charac-
ter of Macbeth the label of chief protagonist. In the first instance the
wish transfers itself from the witches to Macbeth, or if you prefer the
guilty theory, from Macbeth via the witches back to himself. Following
Macbeth, it insinuates itself into Banquos ambiguously clear con-
science. It proceeds to envelop Lady Macbeth despite the formidable
powers of resistance and forbearance she otherwise exhibits. Finally
it runs itself into exhaustion through the dead bodies of its victims, its
energy quenched like a fireball that has jumped from person to person
and finally burned out. After all, if this were not the case, there would be
no drama, perhaps no play. If the wish were not stronger than Macbeth,
if his identity were not its servant for all the psychological depth that
Shakespeare affords Macbeths response to it then there would be no
course: Macbeth would master it, and the play would be over before
begun. In this respect the play is about this uncontainable wish and its
ability to trade identities without respect to the grounding or precedence
that was their supposed privilege. Indeed the wish to be king has a kind
of infinite, sublime or universal force in the face of which identities are
enfeebled, inept at forming themselves.
Why Freud loves to hate graphology
So whats new? Would we know it if we saw it? What does new

mean?
Freud, for one, has seen it all before. When he writes about graphol-
ogy, for example the ancient art of telling fortunes from handwriting
it seems hes got it all sewn up. Theres nothing new no revelation, no
epiphany. This is how Freud deals with prophecy and suggestion. The
graphologist he portrays in Dreams and Occultism had, in the words
of Stracheys translation, once again only brought to light a powerful
secret wish of the person who was questioning him.2
Once again: this phrase serves two purposes at once. Firstly, the
graphologist has once again only brought to light a powerful secret
wish, and in so doing has come upon something already in play, as

138 Death-Drive
opposed to creating for the first time or inventing a hitherto inexistent

phenomenon. True, it was secret, but it was already there. What the
graphologist believes he has identified in all its wondrous novelty is in
fact old news.
And so, the graphologists avowed skill indeed the mtier of graph-
ology in general must be seen as baseless, a parasite upon already given
knowledge, a bootlegger. Graphology seizes upon a known quantity,
and tries to pass off second-hand goods for new its very ethos must
be specious. But its not merely that graphology is a sham or shambles,
but also (secondly) that psychoanalysis is nothing of the sort, evidently.
With the phrase once again a kind of meta-discourse lights up the page.
For Freud is insinuating that while graphology has been and must be
dismissed with due despatch, psychoanalysis on the other hand the
science, the methodology, the profession has been proved correct. The
graphologist once again only brought to light a powerful secret wish of
the person who was questioning him, says Freud, and in so saying he
points, like a doctor of the law, through the tawdry veil of graphology
to a bright psychoanalytic truth shining behind, namely that there are
no mysteries of the sort graphology peddles, only secrets, secret wishes,
dredged from the unconscious of the graphologists client. Well play
down the fact that secret wishes may be just as mysterious as grapholog-
ical revelations pseudo-revelations, I mean for Freud, in his demysti-
fying braggadocio, wants us to think of secret wishes as rather ordinary
(albeit psychoanalytic) facts. The graphologist had once again only
brought to light a powerful secret wish of the person who was question-
ing him, so lets not get too excited about powerful secret wishes. The
once again moderates our curiosity. Secret wishes are somewhat banal
and predictable, we are supposed to think, even though Freud feels some
frisson for that very reason, from their admirable banality, from the
fact that his discovery has (should have) passed into common scientific
circulation: the idea of repression is by now so received that it could not
surely cause a stir. And so it follows that irresistibly or thereabouts
psychoanalysis prime tenet has been once more ratified and upheld.
The unconscious is at work. O graphologist, we can hear Freud think-
ing, you thought you were exhibiting professional prowess, perhaps a
rare gift? Sorry, no all you did was facilitate the bringing to light of a
repressed wish, and in so doing you merely added bolster thank you,
poor creature to my theory of repression and to the science of psychoa-
nalysis in general. Graphology has done some of psychoanalysis work,
in short, the benighted graphologist unwittingly confirming psychoana-
lytic truth and method. Moreover, this kind of thing happens again and
again in the professional life of psychoanalysis. Once again its almost

a clich! the psychoanalytic approach has received its vindication, its

share of justice. Theres nothing new in this, Freud wants to assure us.
Its all almost wearyingly unsurprising, and its all, please be advised,
part of the grand psychoanalytic design.
But of course the fact that Freud needs to make an assurance in
the first place suggests that all is not so self-evident as he might wish.
Without his gentle doctrinal steer towards the correct interpretation we,
the reader, might have missed this point about secrets, not picked up on
the fact that this was yet another case (ah, yes) of the secret wish coming
to light. Gentle but insistent, that is a bit paternalistic. Do not forget
that psychoanalysis, apparently so solid, is in reality but a new and com-
peting science, even by the relatively late stage at which Dreams and
Occultism was penned (1932). In this respect psychoanalysis can boast
scarcely more grounding, very lamentably, than graphology in all its
spuriousness, than this johnny-come-lately that, rather inconveniently,
has been around for a very long time indeed. Freuds stance might be
analogous to that of the early Church Fathers emphasising the institu-
tional force of Christianity at the expense of an archaic paganism from
which it hadnt quite disassociated itself. How long, one wonders, must
a science exist before it can indulge in a once again? Is it premature?
Has psychoanalysis indisputably won its spurs? After all, its not as if
Freud is saying something like, There goes another object dropping to
the floor due to the pull of gravity. Once again gravity has demonstrated
its irrefutable law, and once again my theory has been verified. The
theory of repression, of secret wishes, hardly enjoys that level of sci-
entific or cultural credit it lacks the gravity, the pull. Freud wants us,
needs us, to sense and respect the established status of psychoanalysis,
psychoanalysis in its established status, psychoanalysis as an establish-
ment; he lures us to admire the patina of wisdom, of tried and trusted
sapience accultured around it. And he needs to do so precisely because it
is not absolutely self-evident. The facts do not speak for themselves, so
Freud has to speak for them. It is therefore almost axiomatic that Freud
must rebut graphology. He would have been obliged to rebut any such
institutional threat. He will not cannot, should not, must not hear of
graphology, or varieties of graphologism. To graphology, Freuds ears
must remain closed. He will hear only what he wants to hear, which is
what he already knows, namely that an unconscious secret is in play,
and nothing more.
By virtue of such tensions around the status of psychoanalysis, this
scenario of the graphologist in Dreams and Occultism is already quite
involved, but we must peel off a further layer to find a way to the core
of these issues, a core consisting of concepts of ideology, in brief. In

140 Death-Drive
effect, Freud has taken up or shadowed the very position he assigns to

the graphologists client. Instead of hearing or letting himself hear some-
thing new the equivalent of a graphological revelation Freud will
hear only that which he has already internalised. He will allow neither
himself nor the client to hear anything other than what was already, if
only tacitly, known and preserved the secret wish. In Freuds construc-
tion of the graphological encounter, the client, just like Freud himself,
will be permitted to observe only a secret wish brought to light, and
nothing more, neither extraneous material nor new evidence. The dead-
line for such passed long ago, almost unimaginably far back, almost out
of time. All that is substantive has been posited or deposited long ago.
Its form is the wish, something both the client and Freud already knew
about, nursed already within them, long before the whole epoch of
psychoanalysis precedes it any graphologist came on the scene. The
truth was already within. It was within the client just as it was within
Freud. And, just as the secret was within the client and within Freud,
so the very secret of psychoanalysis itself lay hidden within graphology.
It took Freud to point it out, we acolytes might have missed it, but,
whichever way you cut it, there it was. The secret was wrapped inside
the client, and the secret was wrapped within Freud, just as psycho-
analysis for a long, long time was wrapped inside graphology. It was
there all along. Which means that the time of psychoanalysis is much
older than that of graphology. Graphology, though far older a science,
intruded like a latecomer, an opportunist, a freeloader, upon the scene
of the secret wish, wrapped itself around that wish, secreted it within
its own graphologic body, and then brought it out later disguised as
graphologistic aperu. Psychoanalysis meanwhile, which began as an
institution circa 1900, enjoys a history or epoch of truth that extends
back illimitably. The clients secret acts as a vector of this epoch.
The secret being wishful only adds to the complication. Freuds secret,
his already known knowledge, his ironic perception, is wishful in nature
too, and the example of the graphologist occasions its bringing to light.
In his case, for his part, the secret wish is to uncover psychoanalysis
within graphology and perhaps, indeed, within all that he might range
across, at least those institutions that along with graphology he must
rebut, such as religion rebut them but extract the psychoanalytic truth
at their heart, keep the kernel but toss out the shell. If psychoanalysis
lodges secretly within graphology, its residence there or rather its dis-
coverability triggers an access of libidinal pleasure in Freud himself.
Freud takes pleasure in his phrase, once again only brought to light a
powerful secret wish of the person who was questioning him. It raises
the question of whether a science even if it is modern ought to

permit itself pleasure in the course of its scientific business: shouldnt

that impair some constitutional principle of what it takes to be a science?
Doesnt mixing business with pleasure adulterate the business in prin-
ciple? . . . Freud takes his pleasure twice over, maybe more. Firstly,
that once again gives a yield, and secondly, the fact that the secret has
been brought to light that is, psychoanalysis is right again gives a
yield. Im getting pleasure again from being right again, murmurs the
egoic voice from within Freuds scientific text. And the pleasure in ques-
tion depends for its libidinal charge upon a secret, that is upon what is
already known, and therefore upon a resistance to use an unstable
word to anything new or supervenient.
The missing term in all this is suggestion. The graphologist has, in the
psychoanalytic sense, suggested something to his client. Thats how
the bringing to light of the secret wish had operated. The graphologists
words coincided with that inward wish on the clients part, and sugges-
tion is the name psychoanalysis gives to such coincidence. Its a blatant
misnomer, however, because the client will not, no more than Freud, tol-
erate suggestion of any kind. On the contrary: the graphologists client
and equally his homologue, the analysts patient remain, at least in
Freuds book, impervious to anything other than whats already within
them. It is as if the ego has set their faculties of cognition to receive
pleasurable data only, leaving a broad margin for everything else. You
cant suggest anything else to them and so, in effect, you cant suggest at
all; theres nothing you can come up with. They are blessed or afflicted
depending how you look at it with a kind of structural deafness that
filters out unpleasurable suggestions wherever it can. If suggestion as
a word denotes something new, a ventured proposition, an as yet uncon-
sidered avenue, Freud, or Freudianism, turns it upside down. So what
does the graphologist tell you? Nothing new. Not what will be but what
will have been. What gets deciphered in the handwriting is not the future
but the past, this being the wishs true and only provenance. What will
have been wished surges, by means of suggestion, into the clients field
of cognition whereupon he hears the graphologist describing something
long desired but long repressed.
We may justly deduce, therefore, that the cognition is never not a
re-cognition. In hearing the suggestion, the client experiences the return
of something intimately, even erotically, close to him. It is his truth,
and it is true for him, for him as himself and no other. His very identity
appears to be engaged in this recognition of something within, closely
his, that has been returned to him via the somewhat unpredictable
agency of suggestion. The pathos of this identity effect or affect must be
nearly overwhelming if that indeed is what it is. For here a deep and

142 Death-Drive
critical fault line crackles its way through psychoanalysis. On one side
of it, the theory of the ego as a subject. On the other, the less explored
side, the side I wish to go down here, that of the ego as non-subject,
a subject unconfined by subjectivity, and by extension the ego as the
subject of death.
In summary terms, the ego as subject works under suggestion as
follows. A structurally deaf subject, his or her back turned to all that
is new, to all articles of modernity not exhibiting symmetry with the
ancient inner wish, suddenly by way of a suggestion that is anything
but has its egoic chambers flooded with the miraculous return of that
wish. Return is the word, for the return of the wish carries as its col-
lateral the identity of the wishing person, so much so that in the absence
of such moments of return and recognition that person that subject,
as we are supposed to say might never experience the sense of subjec-
tive identity at all. For whence, in a psychoanalytic environment that
appears to disallow or forestall the creation of identity through ongoing
empirical time, would such a sense arrive? The identity-benefit involved
in suggestion appears intense. The client re-experiences a secret wish
like finding lost property. Not only does the secret belong to him or her,
but the him or her in question finds itself established or re-established in
precisely such moments . . .
But in this I smell a rat, and I want to put up a contrary hypothesis,
namely that identity is neither possible nor desirable for the so-called
subject. Once that is proven, we fall directly into the domain of ide-
ology, and of the inextricable link between ideology and death. The
implications for the story of Freud and the graphologist, for example,
would be profound. Instead of seeing Freud pull the strings to make the
graphologist say what Freud wants him to say, we would steal upon a
scene in which the wish itself is in control and no longer the property or
instrument of Sigmund Freud. The wish in this case is another name
for death and death signifies something rather different from Freuds
own metapsychological definition.
I wish therefore I wish
Perhaps theres nothing new in this going beyond the subject either.
After all, various, especially Francophone, thinkers have for decades
now been questioning the subjectivity and identity of the psychoanalytic
subject and in a second I shall zoom in on one of them. To be more
accurate, various thinkers have taken the prompts they find in Freud
regarding the dissolution of the classical subject and developed them in

their own idiom. More or less adroitly they have eked out the implica-
tions of an ego structurally riven between conscious and unconscious
forces. But in this philosophical discourse of subjectivity, and of the end
of subjectivity call it the latest phase of the Copernican revolution
one critical and singularly psychoanalytic (as opposed to philosophical)
theme has suffered neglect. I refer to the Freudian wish. If the disease
of subjectivity, so to speak, has been so fastidiously catalogued, this has
owed not to any discovery of the deleterious effects of wishing but to a
rather more straightforward manipulation, actually, of canonical philo-
sophic concepts of the self seen to be at work in Freuds writing. Baldly
speaking, the thinking of the Freudian subject, or the post-Freudian
post-subject, has continued within the dimension or lineage of ques-
tions of subjectivity, within the era of the subject, as it were, rather than
turning towards or letting itself be pulled away towards the concept if
it is a concept of the wish. With few exceptions, the subject continues
to be thought in subjectist terms.
Now, one might protest that the wish has been nothing if not worked
and reworked in recent decades, under the name of desire. And how,
one might add, has desire entered the vocabulary of broadly conti-
nental philosophy (whatever its geographic home) if not through psy-
choanalytic channels? Of course, it would be another, and inestimably
more extensive, project to chart the fortunes of the word and concept
desire from Hegel to Lacan, say, or from Marcuse to Foucault but
I venture to guess that any such project would conclude that desire as
wish has been systematically sidelined. Desire as intention, yes. Desire
as an instrument of subjective will, yes again. Desire as the (more or less
futile) pursuit of ontological security, yes yes yes. But desire as wish? I
think not. I attempt to explain it below, but in broad terms this has come
about because the wish, made to stand before the architecture of subjec-
tive identity, simply sees no place in it. Indeed the wish needs no locus,
being an altogether different class of entity than desire. Its not so much
that the wish, to use poststructuralist language, exceeds subjective
identity and thus subjectist thinking, but rather that it has very little to
do with it, at least in its conventional forms. To that extent, writing the
history of the philosophy of the wish would be not merely challenging
but unfeasible in principle the wish was never an object of philosophy
to begin with.
My example here or test-case is Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. I put
example in quotation marks because Borch-Jacobsen both continues
that subjectist tradition and reflects back on it, so that his work does
not sit comfortably there. By and large, Borch-Jacobsen probably
goes further than anyone in unpacking the concept of the subject in

144 Death-Drive
Freudianism, even to the point of neutralising its every philosophic

pretension, but there he stops: he does not (and nor does he aspire
to) then make the leap to a properly psychoanalytic, that is post- or
para-philosophic, position. I begin with an excerpt from his fine book
The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect. In it we find
the author commenting, in turn, on his own earlier publication, the
economically titled The Freudian Subject. Borch-Jacobsen has been
appraising the return, in France, to what he calls Freuds philosophical
underpinnings. He writes:
That, it would be useless to deny, is what I attempted to do in The Freudian

Subject. I thought that it might be timely, even urgent, to question whether,
behind the apparently radical critique of consciousness and ego, the schema
of the subject might not be silently continuing to govern the theory and the
practice which is also to say the politics of psychoanalysis. In short, I
wanted to know the extent to which the fundamental concepts of psychoa-
nalysis might still be the prisoners of, or might have escaped, the summons of
their foundation for that, in fact, is always what is involved in questions of
the subject.3
The paragraph presents psychoanalysis as starting from a philosophical

agenda, an apparently radical critique of consciousness and ego, but
then deviating from it, or being made to deviate from it by the silent
governance of subjectivism controlling it from within. This is why the
radicality of its critique was apparent, not real the apparently radical
critique. In reality the critique had little bite, for subjectivism had
bridled it. So it is a question of freedom and constraint, borne out by the
penal metaphors summons, escaped, prisoners, govern: subjectiv-
ism was the prison from which psychoanalysis critique failed perhaps
to escape.
Borch-Jacobsens Tie contains some knots, however four of them:
1. Giving the name critique to the work of psychoanalysis signals a

prejudice. It positions psychoanalysis not just within philosophy in
general, but within a certain tradition and style of continental and/or
transcendental philosophy, and even within a Kantian or post-
Kantian species thereof. The word critique points down a quite
different path from say, the neuro-psychological path along which
one might equally have seen psychoanalysis leave its tracks.
2. The allusion to Lacan in the quoted phrase fundamental concepts
speaks to a similar prejudice, this one made up of two elements:
(a) The imputation to psychoanalysis of a substrate of fundamental
concepts on which it has been erected and from which it takes its

support confers at a stroke a philosophic stature or profile easy

to dispute. Can the stock-in-trade of psychoanalysis, at least in
its Freudian manifestations, be said unequivocally to consist in
fundamental concepts? Does the Unconscious, for example, add
up to a concept? Not the least reason for doubting so must be
the fundamental point that the Unconscious, if there is such a
thing, begins in the very opposition to and difference from,
those means of conceptualisation considered as conscious and
rational. How would the theory of hysteria, for example, ever
have been developed if this were not the case? One of the great
problems and equally one of the great opportunities for
thought presented by the Unconscious has to be its uncertain
conceptual status, the fact that it refuses to be led rationally or
scientifically back from empirical evidence to theoretical truth.
One cannot prove the existence of the Unconscious, one can
only infer it (as Freud conceded), and the gap between the two,
proof and inference, marks out the absence of its concept. It
doesnt have the benefit of secure conceptual moorings, and if it
did it would not be unconscious. Its not just that the Unconscious
persists in being difficult to conceptualise but rather that the
thought-system in which it operates fails to accord with concep-
tualism, which to it appears quite alien, as if from a different
galaxy.
(b) Lacans work itself and again it is to him that the phrase fun-
damental concepts owes underpins Borch-Jacobsens preju-
dice. Lacans title The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, tells quite a tale. Again it is a matter of finding
or inventing a foundation, and a conceptual foundation to boot,
precisely where (Freudian psychoanalysis) none may exist. The
title describes a classical architecture, a proportionate basis, of
thought, precisely in an area where all classical norms of thought
are lacking, where even the principle of non-contradiction (to
take another fundamental tenet) abjures its privilege. True,
Freudian psychoanalysis has a relatively consistent logic of its
own one might even stretch to calling it a system but when
that logic or that system employs such terms as transference or
life instinct, it has patently taken leave of conceptualist founda-
tions. A notion such as transference must be at best counter-
intuitive, at worst a boundaryless detour from the territory of
the concept: how to safely conceive the relation between two
points (patient and analyst) in which neither is fixed and both
persist chiefly at the suggestion of the other?

146 Death-Drive
3. The critique of consciousness. Who would not be ready to agree that

Freudian psychoanalysis constitutes a critique of consciousness? Yet
that word consciousness represents a faux-ami, for Borch-Jacobsen
has painted it in philosophic rather than psychoanalytic colours.
Consciousness here has associations of Descartes and Kant, that is
with the faculty of reason. Freud may inadvertently have critiqued
the said faculty, but consciousness in this sense was hardly his prin-
cipal target. For Freud consciousness related firstly to the neural
perception system, and secondly to the Unconscious understood as
the reservoir of repressed material. Any critique of consciousness in
the post-Cartesian sense will have been a by-product of these.
4. The critique of ego. The critique of ego? As with the term conscious-
ness, Borch-Jacobsens usage leans towards a general Cartesianism,
to the ego of the cogito. And besides, did Freuds development of the
ego, that is the Freudian Ich, come about as a critical weapon in a
critique of such Cartesianism or did it, rather, come about as a way
of naming the agent of the wish?
So much for Borch-Jacobsens representation of psychoanalysis. In

effect, he turns psychoanalysis into philosophy only to then mock it for
being philosophical (a curious mechanism of oscillating appropriation
and disavowal rattles through his text, one not a million miles from
that described famously by Freud as the fort-da). But the more intrac-
table problem turns on the term subject itself. Try looking it up not
only in the index to the Standard Edition of Freuds works, but even
in Laplanche and Pontaliss Language of Psychoanalysis, and you will
find no match.4 This strikes me as extremely significant, and should
make us stop shy of transposing psychoanalysis so eagerly into the key
of the subject; it should also inhibit the crude subjectist assimilation
of psychoanalysis (be it for or against the subject) perpetrated under
the name of Theory. If Freud elects, however unintentionally, not to
avail himself of that lexicon, it may be for reasons more serious than a
failure of articulation on his part. It may be to do with the nature of the
ego that is, the wishful ego per se. For contrary to the preferences
of the formidable Lacanian tradition and other philosophically inclined
thinkers of psychoanalysis, nothing about the Freudian ego suggests for
a moment that subjectivity in its mode of self-identical or self-reflexive
subject would ever furnish its goal (nor indeed that of the analyst treat-
ing it). The ego has other fish to fry, and subjectivity comes well down its
wish-list. Perhaps the post-Lacanian tradition itself suffers from a kind
of blind wishfulness, positing a desire for subjectivity where none exists.
So it may be less a case of Freud failing to posit a subject, or missing

a trick of philosophic expression, and more the very work of the ego,
the drive of the ego in collaboration with the death-drive to resist or
negate subjectivity in general.
What, after all, does the ego stand to gain from subjectivity? In his next
paragraph from The Emotional Tie Borch-Jacobsen goes on to identify
the (for him) dominant trope of psychoanalysis, the one that confirms
psychoanalysis always comes down to philosophy. This is representation
and, more specifically, self-representation, which, in Borch-Jacobsens
view, everywhere crosses the Freudian subject and so catches psychoa-
nalysis time and again in the net of the cogito it might have thought
to slip. Along with doubt, reason and faith, self-representation forms
a clutch of Cartesian benefits that subjectivity has to offer, though as
the pre-eminent means of subject-formation it stands first among these
equals. A subject unable to represent itself to itself, however falsely,
fails to matriculate as a subject. It has not experienced in Hegelese
that negative moment that confers reality and depth upon its own
position, leaving it to languish in uncompleted non-determinacy. Only
self-representation, even or especially where mediated through another,
can close that gap . . . All of which is fine, but and here is the flaw in
Borch-Jacobsens argument it says nothing about why the ego would
want it. The subject may require self-representation perforce as its con-
dition, but to the Freudian ego the same does not apply. What interests
that ego is not itself as such but its pleasure. And, not needing to posit
itself subjectively, the ego need not be bothered with self-representation
either unless in some secondary way it can glean pleasure from it. In
other words, the stitching-together of self-representation and pleasure
led by Lacan in his work on the mirror-stage calls for unpicking. The
ego will occasionally derive pleasure from self-representation perhaps,
but it has no need for its subjectivist foundations. Indeed it becomes
questionable whether the ego has any self at all, any reflexivity worth
the name in its constitution. But we shall look into that when we return
to the theme of suggestion.
Saying the ego can dispense with self-representation, on the other hand,
does not mean it wants or needs nothing from subjectivity whatsoever.
For all self-representations pre-eminence in the realm of subjectivity, it
defers to a still more primary feature of subjectivity less easy to forego.
This is, if youll pardon me, subjectivity itself the fact of the collected
thereness of an entity, a ground, a locus, a sub-iectum or even thrown-
downness (to give it a Heideggerian accent) and there are reasons why
the ego both must and must not have truck with it. So lets start with
why it must, why, despite the low value to it of self-representation, the
ego must nevertheless maintain some contract with the subjectivity that

148 Death-Drive
is self-representations vehicle and let us drop the word ego in favour

of the Ich used in the original Freud, for once we say ego we acquiesce
in a Latinity not just of word but of concept, implying a juridical notion
of self as that-which-is-to-be-represented, that-which-ought-to-render-
account-of-itself both legally and philosophically. Ich bears no sign of
having agreed, even sub rosa, to such associations.
We had begun to prise this Ich apart from the Cartesian cogito. Do
we infer that Ich is not rational? Well, in a rationalist sense it may
not be rational capable, for example, of mental process that both
synthetically organises conscious perceptions under primary categories
and analytically derives one bit of information from another yet Ich
is nothing if not living calculation. One could even dub it the origin of
calculation, for it does nothing but expend its pre-rational energy in
continually appraising the risks to, and opportunities for, its so sought-
after pleasure where this pre-rational calculation actually abuts on
and structures all calculation of an economic kind in the real world.
Ich watches quasi-neurally for where it will gain pleasure and, where
it cant, identifies the shortest detour back to it. It is economic through
and through, a master calculator of gratification. From this perspective
Ich appears smarter than the subject, and smarter because its more
stupid, more instinctive, more economic, not detained by perfecting self-
representations. It hasnt had to formulate anything about itself, just run
its endless psychomathematics. All of which bears out the uselessness of
subjectivity to Ich; subjectivity would at best slow it down. Yet theres
a snag. Ich not only performs these calculations, it also profits directly
from them it goes on to experience the pleasure it has identified. And in
order to have that experience it would also, one assumes, have to occupy
some site of reception, for how could pleasure be pleasure and remain
unreceived? And how could it occupy such a site without capitulating to
the first rule of subjectivity, namely laying itself down? How can it expe-
rience its own pleasure without being that pleasures subject? Maybe
Ich can live without representation, but subjectivity per se it cannot
so blithely ignore. Ich must let itself perhaps become subject enough
to field the pleasure it has shaken out, even though the accoutrements
of subjectivity, notably self-representation, provide it with nothing it
needs. An infinite Ich, an entirely ungrounded, subjectless Ich would not
be sufficiently determined, or at least sufficiently located, to take its own
pleasure, could not guide its exiled wishes back toward itself.
This is why Ich must forge links with the subjective, even though it
may now waive self-representation. But self-representation was not the
only fly in the ointment. A graver matter should ward Ich away from
subjectivity. It puts Ich in an impossible relation to subjectivity which

now becomes both dearest friend and worst enemy. For the moment this
ever-calculating Ich accepts subjectivity on the terms that without it it
would lack a platform for the receipt of pleasure it finds itself jerked
into a horizon of finitude a horizon tout court demonstrably at vari-
ance with its infinite wishful nature. This rarefied-barbaric Ich, wrought
from unalloyed libidinal wish, knows only expansion, life, absorption,
merging and what Freud will even propose as a multicellular impera-
tive the drive to annexation, the incorporation of others into its self,
etc., and hence an importunate disregard for the preservation of its
own borders as a discrete thing. Nevertheless, this infinite, million-eyed
but blind urge has to contend with some inner structuration in order
to coincide with its own pleasure the amoeba must build a skeleton
to house its jouissance. To experience the fulfilment of its own wishes,
Ich must limit or curb itself and thereby interrupt its own pleasure
pleasures arrival, so to speak, cuts a caesura in it. This momentary but
irreducible break punctuates Ich like a minor death, an incision into an
entity spawned upon continuous self-preservation through expansion.
The rabid pursuit of pleasure therefore polarises Ichs direction as a
thing; now Ich founders at 180 degrees from itself, caught irreconcil-
ably between finitude and infinity. So when one invokes subjectivity in
relation to psychoanalysis, one should do so only by proceeding briskly
beyond those relatively superficial aspects such as self-representation
towards these more essential questions. What Derrida might call a
necessary but impossible relationship between subjectivity and Ich is
at stake.
Nor is it some merely notional limit to Ich that we are describing.
Being brought into the dimension of subjectivity entails for Ich a first
sense of time and specifically of its own time, of a temporality in its
nature now to be logged and factored in with its otherwise open-ended
and open-mouthed odyssey. The Being-towards-Pleasure of Ich may
differ hugely from philosophical Dasein, but having buckled on its rude
subjectivity and entered the pleasure-economy and having found there
its niche Ich learns its first and most lasting lesson, namely that it must
wait. If pleasure requires pursuing it means it is not here yet, and waiting
for it shapes all of Ichs experience. Ich now feels itself to be in time
insofar as it has had patience and suffering thrust upon it. There is, then,
a pathos of this Ich, a pathos existing at the highest structural level, an
affect before affectivity, and as such its almost transcendental quality
would make one hesitate before citing it as self-relation (certainly it
would not be self-representation) on Ichs part; but on the other hand
a certain negativity, formally similar to that in Hegelian dialectics, has
now pressed itself into Ichs innocent mould. The imprint it leaves must

150 Death-Drive
look like death, for hitherto nothing had checked its erotic polyphilo-
progenitivity. It has gained a drowning-mark upon it, to paraphrase The
Tempest, a watermark of temporality, of waiting and of cessation. One
would hesitate too before reframing such pathos of the Ich as a form
of lack or absence (the likely post-Lacanian reading). If Ich waits for
something (pleasure) that by definition eludes it, this does not necessar-
ily imply that an absence blanks out its centre. Its experience of time,
though one of deferral and gratification, does not straightforwardly
equate to a simple loss-and-gain or absence-and-presence, for Ich has
always been redolent with wishing. Rather than a subject equipped
with a wish either fulfilled or put off, Ich is nothing but wish itself,
wish incarnate. Immanent within Ich, the wish needs to be understood
as verb rather than noun, so to speak, an ongoing, dynamic, erotic
wishing always inundated with that unquenchable instinct. Such is the
libido, and such the difference between philosophic and psychoanalytic
subject.
And yet, another twist. Our brand of psychoanalytic subjectivity
requires one extra distillation. We have purified it of self-representation,
and we have purified it of some metaphysical sediment of absence and
presence, but still it needs to be cleansed of an equally metaphysical
notion of place. The thrown-down sub-iect will, insofar as it will thereby
have been posited, have been posited somewhere. Subjectivity goes hand
in hand with some kind of placement, some location, and Ichs albeit
two-faced concordat with it might suggest that it has been placed some-
where too. How can it take on its subjective substrate without not just
being placed but placed somewhere where its pleasure can accrue? And
indeed, were it not for the possibility (for Freud the necessity) of trans-
ference, one might rest on a fairly secure notion of the place of pleasure.
Were transference not the cardinal notion we have learned to jib at
calling it a fundamental concept that it is, Ich might well succumb
further to subjectivitys totemic power. Standing firmly on its moving
subjective dais, as upon some Greek chariot, it would simply search
out, among all the superegoic, social traffic conspiring to delay it, the
quickest route by which to fulfil its wishes, and then ingest them, upon
its own ground. It would become a docile consumer, identifiable to any
wish-marketeer. Nothing even as modestly subtle as vicarious pleasure
would complicate the scene. With the general possibility of transference,
however, and the specific case of suggestion to which we now return, Ich
finds itself curiously moved from where and what it thought it was in
order to feel pleasure in a form it didnt reckon it would enjoy.
About suggestion we were saying that any cognition of it on the patient
or clients part marks a re-cognition, to the extent that suggestion is

really the opposite of whats going on. As in the case of the graphologist,
suggestion works by bringing to light a wish (powerful, secret) that has
been locked out under repression which is all well and good except
that nothing new has been adduced, despite the words connotations. It
only refits Ich to itself, and doubtless some of the pleasure Ich experi-
ences must be that of appreciating the economy, the conservative genius
even, of this gesture. Though Ich appears to receive the suggestion from
another, from outside itself, that suggestion has pleasurable qualities
only to the extent that it originated with Ich it merely plays back that
which Ich had at some formative stage figured as pleasurable but had
learned to repress, and thus works like an echo. Once again, nothing
new can ever be proffered to Ich, which immures itself against all news,
attuned solely to the belated and stochastic fragments of pleasure-sound,
the delayed psychic music that sporadically reverberates upon it.
But we were also hinting that suggestion, grouped as it is under the
general logic of transference, cannot be so conceptually neat, for, being
psychoanalytic, its conceptualist foundations are prone to subsidence.
Indeed suggestion has more power than even Freud imagined, effecting
a displacement upon Ich so forceful that the very notion of Ich itself will
be utterly changed. At first sight, granted, one might take suggestion
as a means of negative self-positing on Ichs part. One might think,
in a Hegelian-Lacanian way, that the suggestion, as a ticket back to its
innermost pleasure, offers a kind of dark mirror in which Ich perceives
and knows itself. But such an interpretation sits on two questionable
pillars, and this is where the question of place becomes critical.
According to Freud suggestion works, as we know, by bringing to
light a powerful secret wish. It appears to have maieutic, even shaman-
istic, features. What was hidden gets drawn out, except no magic is
supposed to be involved. Because, however, that wish has been secret,
even and especially to its bearer, its bringing to light feels less like the
exposure of a withheld truth than the miraculous apparition of some-
thing now returned. If the secret wish is indeed secret even to its bearer,
the original secretion of it would be tantamount to its being lost, and not
least because it will have been sent to the Unconscious where, obviously
enough, Ich cannot be conscious of it. To all intents and purposes the
wish is lost. Moreover, that wish could not be said to have been repressed
if in principle it might not have remained lost forever. Once posted into
the Unconscious by the act of repression, the wish in principle has been
lost for good. This means it remains structurally lost even if and when
returned, for its passing beyond the reaches of conscious (re)cognition
has conditioned it. The implication in turn is that the wish could never
again be fully and properly identified as such, and when suggestion

152 Death-Drive
allegedly brings to light a powerful secret wish it actually brings to light

something intrinsically unrecognisable. The suggestion responsible for
returning the wish returns a mysterious object or affect that differs in
principle from the original and not by virtue of a classic Freudian dis-
placement and condensation such as occurs in the dreamwork, which
after all preserves the core identity of the wish, but of a determining loss
from the time of its repression that infects it with such deceiving unrec-
ognisability. In effect the secret wish remains secret even when charmed
into the open by suggestion. What Ich falls for in recognising its long-
lost wish must be essentially false. It cannot but misrecognise the wish
that returns without ever being certifiably itself again.
Hence a predicament: how can Ich cash in the pleasure that now
threatens to vanish amid its own disguises and alterations? Will it be
content to welcome back this changeling despite the chronic uncertainty,
as in The Return of Martin Guerre, over its authenticity? I think this pre-
dicament leaves us with two options. Either (1) Ich does somehow com-
promise and find a way of gleaning pleasure by this uncanny revenant
from its own Unconscious that it will never properly recognise, or (2)
Ich changes to accommodate the potential pleasure, that is it adapts and
becomes the right Ich for that pleasure. Psychoanalytically speaking,
only option (2) can be viable. Remember that Ich has nothing invested in
its own identity; as a protean wish-merchant it (and of course it cannot
therefore be an it) seeks only pleasure, drawing on subjectivity to the
minimum and certainly not to the extent of buying identity from it. Thus
it has no qualms about giving itself up wherever pleasure is on offer.
This is the deep sense in which suggestion works, and it is where
Freud has understated the odds. For if Ich is so and so justifiably
blas about its identity, suggestion may not just influence but funda-
mentally alter and refashion it at will. As a mode of the transference,
it not only suggests pleasures that Ich adopts forthwith, it actually
recreates Ich in their image. Ichs indifference towards its own identity
causes it to be infinitely malleable, such that Ich amounts to no more
than a mist of reactive energy ready to coalesce around random sugges-
tions of pleasure. Responsive in an a priori fashion, Ich is less a thing
that responds, more a potential responsiveness per se, a latent ground
upon which pleasure figures itself. Suggestion must be understood in a
very strong sense indeed, not as the felicitous art of wish-inducement so
much as a form of manipulation with the power to impress new mate-
rial upon Ichs pliable mind. You could call it brainwashing, except that
Ich enjoys no existence before or outside of such suggestive encounters,
being rather constituted by each one afresh. Strictly speaking, Ich has no
body or substance to corrupt or pervert, so that suggestion in this strong

sense should not automatically be construed as malevolent; one might

even say that suggestion gives birth to the innocent, virgin Ich that it
simultaneously determines.
If this is true, it flies in the face of Freudian accounts of suggestion
(and at the least exacerbates an ambiguity in psychoanalytic theory and
practice regarding suggestions openness to abuse). Whereas Freud effec-
tively bars anything new from the scene of suggestion, anything other
than what was already known and held within Ich, we are arguing the
contrary, that everything suggested appears new and even surprising,
for the wish will first have been lost beyond recognition before sugges-
tion purports to re-deliver it. Even if this were the old wish resurfaced,
Ich would not be able to recognise it as such, forced always to occupy
a position a placeless place of reaction and response in relation to
it. So that, in addition to this dislocation of the wish, the evanescent Ich
that condenses around it will only ever achieve brief, strategic identity as
the wishs reagent-at-hand.
As for the notion of pleasure, it too calls for adjustment. If Ich does
indeed get pleasure from suggestion, but the wish suggested in that
process is structurally other than the original it supposedly reactivates,
such pleasure must also be divided from itself, or perhaps refracted like
a pencil seen in a glass of water. Just as suggestion revives a wish that
has been structurally lost and is therefore no longer there to be revived,
so the original pleasure, now in theory reactivated, has actually been
effaced. So how could Ich get its pleasure? How would it know how to
recognise it? Only, presumably, through some legerdemain that enables
Ich to fancy the suggested wish as a peculiar form of the original. Ich
would hear the new, suggested wish and immediately ascribe some
provenance to it, mythologise it in order to make it erotically acceptable,
deceive itself or the wish that the impostor be the real thing. Only then
would the books balance. Except that Ich, as we were saying, has but
strategic identity of its own, fabricated on the spot by the wish-field in
a moment we shall describe this as the ideology-field that possesses it.
Beneath these conflicting views (on the one hand, Ich nebulously
floating until seized upon and configured by the wish; on the other, Ich
retaining sufficient identity to be able to fantasy pleasure back into that
same wish) lie views equally conflicting about pleasures characteristics.
In Freud, pleasure only ever comes back, only ever becomes itself in rela-
tion to a memory or history; and suggestion, apart from anything else, is
a theory of memory. Freud cannot conceive pleasure except as a relation
to the past, and his famous formula for it, the absence of unpleasure,
refers to a former peace. But according to the other view, the one we are
propounding, pleasure arrives as if from nowhere, almost like chance,

154 Death-Drive
even if Ich then airbrushes it to make it look like it came from its own
psychic past. The difference in these views derives in turn from different
interpretations of repression. As we were saying, repression wields more
power than Freud apportions it: in being able to secrete wishes into the
Unconscious, repression does more than simply save them into a bank
from which, under the subsequent mandate of suggestion, they may be
withdrawn. The act of repression separates the wish from the conscious
realm as it transfers it to the Unconscious, and in this transfer the wish
forsakes its recognisability. In this respect, the Unconscious describes a
quite different psyche from that of the Consciousness it traditionally
couples, and, whats more, if it didnt it wouldnt be unconscious. If the
Unconscious is unconscious, it cannot pair up with a Consciousness, for
insofar as repression divides the one from the other at a fundamental
level they do not belong to the same order, the order of the one, the
univocal psyche. Ironically, then, repression constitutes not a link with,
but a break from, the past, or at most a deep reconfiguration of it. Since
nothing wishful and repressed from the past can be recognised with any
confidence, we conclude that nor can any cognitive or epistemological
surety guarantee continuity from then to now.
In what, therefore, does pleasure consist? All right, it may have
unplugged from the past, it may burst at unprecedented intervals like
lightning upon this quivering, erotic Ich, but what is its affective tie to
Ich? (Borch-Jacobsens The Emotional Tie translates Le lien affectif.)
All we have to go on is precisely that randomness, for any pleasure
bodied forth by suggestion could not be recognised as such, and it may
be, moreover, that very randomness that holds the key to pleasure. It
may be just that break with the past, the deviation from continuity, the
wandering from aetiological progression which define pleasure as such.
In proposing this we take another pace, of course, away from Freud
whose absence of unpleasure would abhor so disruptive a code; and
we also highlight the fact that by reclaiming Ich, as we tried to, from
subjectivity and its promise of identity, ostensibly a gesture of Freudian
fundamentalism on our part, we were already severing Ichs ties to its
own past as a specific, whole and unique entity, and thereby depriving it
of its essential Freudian continuity and integrity, its conatus, over time.
Our fundamentalism regarding the wish has thus far been so unremit-
ting, in other words, that for the sake of this one sacrament it has flouted
Freudian theology more broadly.
Another way of posing the issue would be to ask whether Ich requires
a memory, in effect a memory of itself, in order to hunt and gather pleas-
ure, but again the answer hangs on ones understanding of repression.
Freud, manifestly, would never entertain the risk of repressed material

being absolutely lost, while we are countering that repression deserves

its name under that condition only. Not just that, but this in-principle
loss, this gap at the heart of memory, even of history, makes possible all
subsequent movement, variation, progression and contingency. Contra
Freud (but perhaps pro Nietzsche) not all of the future reflects the past.
Psychologically speaking, a de jure stratum of forgetting runs through
the psyche, somewhere between conscious and unconscious functions.
The taking of pleasure will have been preceded by this blackout, by a
forgetting or kind of super-repression, and probably more than preceded
by it coloured by it, afforded its affective sense. That is, the structural
loss preceding and determining the fulfilment of a wish accounts for at
least a portion of the pleasurableness of the pleasure taken. Pleasure may
or may not have to do with the presentation, the coming-into-presence,
of some gratification, but it almost certainly involves an experience, if
that is the mot juste, of a loss, of a non-recognition, of an otherness or
forgetfulness both within and outside its reach. Ich has to a degree to not
know or misrecognise pleasure in order to experience it as such.
Before closing this excursus, let us return briefly to Macbeth to see
how our understanding might have developed in the light of the pre-
ceding remarks. We pitched into the debate over whether the witches
prophecy marks the return of Macbeths own repressed wish or, on
the other hand, articulates some kind of external knowledge of which
Macbeth, up to that point, has been innocent. We are now equipped
to see the dilemma as false. Even if Macbeth, this fictional character,
had, let us say, nursed within him for a considerable time prior to the
witches apocalypse the wish for, the thought of, his own accession
to the Scottish throne, and if he had, on account of its treacherous and
transgressive character, been obliged to repress that wish, he would still
be in a position to be surprised by it as it came again to light, for the
mechanism of repression, in a constitutive moment, will have taken the
wish away from him absolutely before returning it through the conduit
of the witches. Structurally speaking, Macbeth will have had to forget
the wish, so that even if the very same, original wish returns to him,
it must come as a surprise. He will be surprised by the private truth
he has hatched so long, surprised, in effect, by himself and open to
suggestion as if he had stopped being himself for a while. The pleasure
he experiences that rush of exhilaration at hearing the prophecy, an
adrenal hit that he must mask from his accompanying officer, Banquo
concerns therefore this gap in his own continuity rather than the appar-
ently pleasurable content of the wish being installed as king.
The notion of owning ones repressed material seems naive in the face
of repressions true power. After all, how could the witches have got

156 Death-Drive
hold of Macbeths wish if this were not the case? How, if there were not
some cutting of the thread between Macbeth and his private ambition,
some repression in the radical sense, could the wish ever be hijacked by,
in this case, the witches? For it does not take witches to perform this
supposedly supernatural feat; rather, it belongs to the nature of repres-
sion not just to open repressed secrets to others, but equally to invent
another persons secrets for them so that they could appear authentic.
In this respect the witches merely personify the law of repression as
the expropriation, circulation and manipulation of the repressed. That
secrecy of the wish within himself demarcates almost geometrically the
space or possibility of the others appropriation and utilisation of it, as
a kind of non-foreknowledge, or fore-non-knowledge, on his part. The
space of prophecy coincides with this gap within himself.
Finally, therefore, the condition of the inner truth, the substance
of prophecy, equally works as pure fiction. I will work up this thought
below, but in a radical sense Macbeth does not and cannot know or
decide what the status of the prophecy-suggestion is. Because of that
inner gap, that suspension of memory, he has become incapable of
adjudicating over the prophecy-suggestions authenticity, meaning that
it is true and fictional in equal parts. Which means in turn that Macbeth
finds himself caught between recognition and credulity, knowledge and
belief hence the irresolvable question over whether or not he already
had the picture of his own elevation. In Macbeth that (in)credulity
or unlikelihood of the suggestion wears the clothes of weird sisters,
appearing in a deliberately semi-believable form as if to make the point.
And more subliminally the play as a whole deals with credulity, sup-
pressing vision in particular in favouring of hearing, hearing through
the darkness within. Whats more, the secret wish, the royal ambi-
tion, remains secret to Macbeth even in the moment and aftermath of
its exposure, for his own original link to it has been lost, whether it
existed or not. A dark spot on the revealed wish itself is the possibility
of repression.
Ideology sans ideologues
I heralded earlier the onset of ideology into these issues. Clearly, the
Freudian subject we have been attending to dwells in an extreme pas-
sivity that makes it easy game for all forms of manipulation, especially
political. Ironically, this is to reclaim the term subject, for while on
the one hand it continues to lack any positive self-reflexivity indeed
has had its relation to self largely excised on the other hand Ich has

now clothed itself in little but its being-subject-to suggestion, subject,

therefore, to everything except itself. Left like this, such a concept of
subjectivity looks merely paranoid, however, making the Ich-subject
the plaything of random voices, or ideological cannon fodder. So lets
develop it further, and by way of an adjustment to Freuds notion of the
death-drive.
We saw Freud shadow-boxing with the hapless graphologist, banning
anything new from the scene of suggestion. The wish had to corre-
spond to an ancient desire, recall a preserved origin. In other work,
Freud leverages this aspect of the wish to open a new dimension, that
of the death-drive. Under the governance of the pleasure principle,
the wish seeks out a fundamentally conservative or nostalgic pleasure
untrammelled by the accretions and vicissitudes that the Ich-subject
subsequently has been forced to contend with. The pleasure principle
aims to provide pleasure to the Ich-subject by restoring, as we now well
know, what Freud calls an earlier state of things, and not the sweet
insouciance of an idealised childhood either, but a deep anteriority that
is the archaic state from which human beings evolved the state of the
single cell organism, no less. The Ich-subject will experience the greatest
pleasure by feeling, like the least complex biological form imaginable,
the least agitation or anxiety possible, and, if possible, not feeling or
experiencing at all. In effect this sets the pleasure principle the task of
driving towards death, for the state of death, according to Freud, mani-
fests itself exactly as that state of zero motion and nil pathos. At that
first decisive moment rises up a non-synthetic pleasure related mitochon-
drially to every Ich-subject ultimately issuing from it. The Ich-subject is
therefore open to suggestion on two extreme conditions only: first, as we
have both explained and contested, that the suggestion doesnt suggest
anything new; second, that the suggestion suggests or at least activates
something that is, on the contrary, as old as the Ich-subjects primordial
origin in the deathly form of early life on the planet . . . Every moment
of (suggested) pleasure reads in some infinitesimal way back through
a quasi-genetic code to this ultimate origin, each time reaffirming
genealogical continuity and the speciation of the human species.
The species is not alone in benefiting. Among the many paradoxes
cast off by the theory of the death-drive is that that drive, though a drive
toward death, actually serves to underpin the identity of the Ich-subject
itself. The drive makes it avoid variation, reins it back from pursuing
pleasures not already within it, thus leaving it with only one viable
modus vivendi repetition. True, the drive will allow the Ich-subject a
degree of latitude, by indulging its sublimational essays at finding pleas-
ure in altered forms, but beneath such disguises the pleasures remain

158 Death-Drive
the same and always endorsed by death. The Ich-subject only ever
repeats, and though, as we were arguing earlier, it may not count for
much, all that monotonous travail eventually returns a fruit in the form
of identity. Enough repetition and the Ich-subject becomes predictable,
which means identifiable. Somewhat as in a fractal pattern, the Ich-
subject gains for itself on a miniature level an identity writ large at the
level of the species. Such identity, however, is merely the by-product of
repetition, and not the metaphysical prize that so many commentators
credit it with being. Both to itself and to its observers, the Ich-subject
will have accrued a discernible identity by virtue of this undeviating
labour of death it enacts. What we call identity is nothing but the largely
predictable series of deathly forays towards an original pleasure.
Nevertheless, such identity contains a certain force, and it can be
mistaken for subjective agency capable in its own right of emitting per-
suasive suggestions to others, and thus participating in an economy.
In other words, it doesnt take much deathly repetition before the Ich-
subject not only gains, albeit inadvertently, an identity for itself, but
also looks to have a consistent purpose in the world that makes it act
in a determined and calculated direction. It appears to be doing things,
actively, and in the name of some tacit pledge to the continuation of its
own identity identity in quotation marks because, as we have said,
it is merely the perceptible surface of a deathly and repetitious drive
towards pleasure. Once this happens, the Ich-subject descends into
the world of negotiation with other Ich-subjects in order to barter for
its own pleasure in a more or less aggressive, more or less sublimated
manner. It enters the bestial market of competition. Having arrived
there, it will do what it can to bend the social and market forces into the
shape of its own gratification, but achieve only mixed success depending
on the competitive strength of others trying to do the same. Everyone
pursues their own pleasure in a manner consistent enough to render
them identifiable, but with sufficient resistance from everyone else that
the pleasure is always likely to be compromised.
That prospect calls for a tactical response, a means of influencing the
competitive forces at large. Enter persuasion, the most effective tool
the Ich-subject can wield to bring others in line with its own wishes, or
at least reduce the levels of obstruction. As its fundamental means of
weakening the competition, persuasion also doubles as the Ich-subjects
tradecraft of identity, for in an intrinsically selfish marketplace it is only
by applying techniques of persuasion that the Ich-subject can advance its
cause, namely to win pleasure and influence people (and thereby trigger
the side effect which is its semblance of identity). And persuasion, need-
less to say, will be more effective the more it works like the suggestion

from which in any case it barely differs the more, that is, that the Ich-
subject, crudely or subtly, can persuade other Ich-subjects that what its
asking for for itself in fact corresponds to and satisfies a wish on the
part of those other Ich-subjects it needs to bring round. It must dress up
what it wants as what others need, and the way to do this is via suasory
suggestion suggestion, indeed, in the Freudian sense. The death-drives
irrefusable injunction to secure undisturbed pleasure results down the
track in the necessity of persuasion and therefore rhetorical guile. In
sum, death makes the Ich-subject rhetorical or, to be even more blunt,
the origin of rhetoric is death.
Yet Freud would blanch at this. Not because of the deduction that
steps from rhetoric to death, probably, but because of seeing suggestion
and persuasion elided. On his view, suggestion and persuasion (rhetoric)
will diametrically oppose one another. Suggestion has no use for rheto-
ric, for it does not have to persuade the subject of this or that, it has
merely to hit on the right thing and then open sesame the wish springs
forth. Freudian suggestion, unlike rhetorical persuasion, has no orders
to move the subject from one position to another (as in the rhetori-
cal figure of movere); just finding the right nerve will do the trick. No
real labour is required, other than analytic patience and perhaps some
deft facilitation. To Freudian eyes it would seem, therefore, that any
rhetoric at hand must be the work not of the Ich but of the ber-Ich,
the Superego, the agency with the explicit role of aligning the subject to
external norms that by definition run counter to the egos own trajectory
. . . But even then, the Superego works by law or norms, not persuasion,
and to this extent it too can transact its business without recourse to
rhetorical exertions.
So despite the fact that Freud allows for sublimation what I have
glossed as marketplace activity he balks at one of its prime conse-
quences. Namely, that sublimation requires the Ich-subject not only to
find a social grid for its own pleasure to circulate discreetly through, but
also to compete with others in a real economy that gives it little choice
but to acquire techniques of persuasion or rhetoric, in other words.
Persuasion and the armoury of rhetoric go with the territory of being an
Ich-subject, or being in the world and on the path to pleasure. Where
Freud effectively precludes the possibility of persuasion, and thus of
rhetoric (and of ideology, which I am coming to), I am saying precisely
that plenty of room exists for these forces to vent their ambiguities.
Consequently we must deprive the psychoanalytic notion of suggestion
of its somewhat sequestered status as the professional elicitation of a
canonic wish. Forming a trinity with persuasion and rhetoric, sugges-
tion belongs in a much rougher sphere, open for necessary reasons to

160 Death-Drive
abuse and manipulation and under the lofty aegis of deathly pleasure.
Whats more it exploits a structural interval in identity that repression
will have created. And even if repression has not created that interval
even if no such thing as repression exists at all it hardly matters. It is
not possible to prove the existence of repression precisely because, if its
working properly, it removes repressed material from the sphere of veri-
fication, which means, tragically, that theres no empirical or juridical
difference between repressed material and total fiction. The fact that the
Ich-subject cannot gauge its own truth, that it cannot judge the veracity
of even supposedly authentic suggestions, indicates a kind of snow-blind
zone between these suggestions and those that are entirely new, devious
and adventitious, where each dazzles into the other. The Ich-subject may
in clear conscience appropriate the fictions as thoroughly its own, and
up to no limit its uncertainty makes it capable of adopting a host of
opportunistic suggestions. Will these still correspond to its own pleasure
and death? Maybe, maybe not.
Critics who detect some ideological force in the Superego have there-
fore missed the point by several yards. Ideology does not work simply
by being superegoically paternalistic: that would be far too legible, too
stylised, too proper, like the inscription on an architrave. It is not the
same as a set of rules or prohibitions which (Ich-)subjects must adapt
to and work around. It is not some manifestation of the father. Nor is
it necessarily hegemonic. It works, rather, in the space of persuasion,
rhetoric and doubt, that is where people are not sure of their own con-
victions, and for a priori not empirical or positive reasons. Ideology
thrives in this crepuscular melt of truth and fiction, where the rift in
memory, the skip in alleged self-continuity ultimately the impossibil-
ity of the subject welcomes in the very possibility of suggestion, that
is the taking on of anothers truth for reasons that cannot always,
if ever, be determined. After all, the Ich-subjects judgement has been
severely circumscribed as a consequence of the suggestions inscrutable
provenance, its powers of discernment addled, and with reason rolled
back like this, a kind of madness provides the target for ideology and
suggestion.
I want to be quite clear on this because I believe it represents a
radically progressive way of conceptualising ideology. I start from the
premise that ideology cannot get off the ground without some means
of influencing people (for reasons that should be clear by now I dont
want to call them subjects), so that persuasion in one form or another
becomes indispensable to it. From this premise one could proceed in
a number of more or less conventional directions Ill give just two,
abbreviated, examples:

1. One could argue, still from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective,

that ideology moves people by suggesting things to them (social and
economic behaviours usually) which they then take on as desirable,
whether or not they nurtured such desires in the first place.
Essentially, this is ideology as a form of marketing.
2. Or one could argue, from an anti-psychoanalytic perspective, that
ideological persuasion more closely resembles coercion, whether
explicit or implicit, and whether resisted or colluded in by the com-
munity it affects. It would therefore occupy a quite separate domain
from that of desire and perhaps of psychology in general. Such per-
suasion involves a supplementary or gratuitous force, meaning that
it finds support in some more or less recognised threat.
Both examples depict a hegemonic and somewhat programmatic or

operational deployment of ideology, and no doubt one could produce
examples of both from everyday life. They imply the prosecution by one
set of people of some purpose to which they wish to make another set
of people conform. And even where one locates ideological force not
with a group of people but displaced versions of them as discourse or
discursive practice, the rules of purpose and hegemony still broadly
apply. I want to qualify and supplement such examples by saying that
the madness at the heart of ideology that we are now broaching means
that ideological effects can and do occur not always with some purpose
in view, or according to a premeditated agenda, but often for no good
reason at all. The power of suggestion stems from the Ich-subjects not
being able to know or decide finally what his or her truth actually is;
suggestion holds this indeterminacy open. One does not necessarily have
to be persuaded of this or that, for one begins on a bias, divorced from
the convictions those truths falsely ossified into beliefs that otherwise
might have held off persuasions ideological advances. The Ich-subject
is born in ideology, not just because of social conditioning or inherited
prejudice, but because its truth cannot be distinguished from fiction; it
cannot identify, for structural reasons, the origin or author of what it
believes. Indeed, belief is the best it can achieve, the attachment to a
position without certainty and therefore without unequivocal reason. If
only ideology were as simple as in the examples above! It would be pos-
sible to name its origin and perhaps defuse it. But it is precisely because
it does not begin out there and because it is not owned and because a
certain madness or causelessness structures it from within that it pro-
vokes so much havoc. After all, if there were absolute knowledge and
final certainty, it would find ready acceptance, whereas ideology breeds
in the inaccessibility of such certainty and knowledge, or in other words

162 Death-Drive
in the indeterminacy at the centre of a never-completed attempt at self-

identity by what were once known as ideological subjects. The persua-
sion at hand behaves less like the transmission of a purpose than the
random adoption of beliefs based in a constitutive uncertainty. Ideology
means that we cannot trust what we know, not necessarily because we
have been served unreliable or politically interested information, but
because we can never be certain of what we know thats a condi-
tion of knowledge, and it everywhere contaminates knowledge with its
anathema, namely belief.
To bring these themes into focus and begin my conclusion I want to
treat a short passage from a text contemporary with Freuds work on
the death instincts, Carl Schmitts famous 1932 essay, The Concept of
the Political. As I read it, the central theses of the essay concern them-
selves with the right of the state to exact death from its enemy in order
to preserve itself and, correlatively, to exact death from its own subjects
in the effort to do that enemy down. Now, Schmitts focus, as one
might expect, falls on things other than the notion of suggestion per se,
especially from a psychoanalytic perspective, and other than ideological
persuasion. Nevertheless these themes lie at the heart of his argument, as
it will be easy to demonstrate.
Midway through the essay, Schmitt writes:
A religious community, a church, can exhort a member to die for his belief
and become a martyr, but only for the salvation of his own soul, not for the
religious community in its quality as an earthly power; otherwise it assumes
a political dimension. Its holy wars and crusades are actions which presup-
pose an enemy decision, just as do other wars. Under no circumstances can
anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society,
whose order in the economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sac-
rifice his life in the interest of rational operations. To justify such a demand
on the basis of economic expediency would contradict the individualistic
principles of a liberal economic order and could never be justified by the
norms or ideals of an economy autonomously conceived. The individual
may voluntarily die for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like every-
thing in an essentially individualist liberal society, a thoroughly private
matter decided upon freely.5
The paragraph occurs in the course of an insistent argument dealing

precisely with the concept of the political. For Schmitt and I sum-
marise much too hastily the political begins in hostility and defence
and in the identification by a state of an enemy from which it funda-
mentally distinguishes itself. Indeed that (hostile) identification of the
other constitutes, in a generically Hegelian fashion, a founding moment
in the identification of itself. The possibility of war or conflict (Schmitt

prefers the Greek polemos) therefore conditions the state and creates
its political character. This political character, however, tips over into
the existential when that possibility becomes imminent or real. At that
point the state takes licence from itself (a kind of mise en abyme, to be
sure) to do that which, politically, it will have thereto only envisioned:
namely to kill the enemy and sacrifice its own. The right over life forms
the fulcrum between the different orders, the political and the existen-
tial; the political marks the possibility of war, the existential its prospect
or actuality, but in both the states taking of its own citizens lives forms
an essential horizon.
In the paragraph cited, Schmitt considers illegitimate attempts to
claim the lives of subjects. He writes that A religious community,
a church, can exhort a member to die for his belief and become a
martyr, but only for the salvation of his own soul, not for the religious
community in its quality as an earthly power; otherwise it assumes a
political dimension. Where the political has a right over the lives of
subjects defines itself moreover by it other social forms or cultural
institutions such as religion enjoy no such claim. These must respect the
broadly liberal individualism to which such subjects will have effectively
subscribed. In this sphere subjects demarcate themselves through their
beliefs, and it is only by getting onside of these beliefs, so to speak, that
in this case a religious community might succeed in influencing its
members to give up their lives. Once it steps beyond that mark and asks
a member to die for its own benefit, the religious community assumes
a political character. More precisely, it assumes a false political char-
acter for, unlike the state, it will not have founded itself originally in
the face of an enemys hostility and its own hostility toward the enemy.
But in any case liberal individualism has little regard for the political in
Schmitts sense: it will practise a negation of the political (p. 70), an
evasion of the primary laws of hostility and defence upon which Schmitt
seeks to build his argument.
We are dealing, then, with subjectivity as a way of maintaining or
giving up beliefs, and of an irreducible relationship between such beliefs
and death. The fact that I hold beliefs means that from a religious, cul-
tural, liberal and individualist perspective I am invulnerable: factors like
these will (or should) never be able to make me die for them. Any death I
(voluntarily) embrace will have to countersign, so to speak, the contract
I have already instituted with my own beliefs, a contract to which reli-
gious, cultural, etc. forms will not be privy and which they cannot affect
in any material way. I protect my very being, therefore, with my beliefs.
But on the other hand, should the political, for existential reasons, need
to claim my life in order to defeat an enemy, then my beliefs will count

164 Death-Drive
for nought. At that hour when the state calls me, I leave my beliefs at
home in the name of a higher authority. In sum, my beliefs shield me
from everything in one direction, from nothing in another. They both
preserve me and expose me to my death, though this relationship is far
from symmetrical. The exposure or vulnerability has to weigh much
more, for being exposed at all to (political) death means that the beliefs
I otherwise hold add up in the final reckoning to very little: at any
moment they can be set aside for the sake of the states preservation. In
stylised terms, Schmitt posits a foundation consisting of politics, war,
hostility, the existential and the states right over life, and on top of that
foundation, usually ignoring or falsely attempting to negate it, a layer of
beliefs, economics, liberalism and the choice over ones own death.
Where do ideology and suggestion fit in this picture? If my earlier
argument is correct, even the beliefs I espouse and may use from time
to time to shoulder off my exploitation by, for example, religious com-
munities serve not to bolster but undo me as a subject. I cannot be sure
of their provenance and that uncertainty nothing less than the source
of the credulity that establishes my stance towards the world exposes
me on my would-be subjective side just as much as I am exposed on
the political. One might object that the stakes on either side stack up
quite differently being exposed on the political side, according to the
Schmittian formulation, means facing ones death directly, whereas
simply being credulous seems at worst ideologically discomfiting. But
really, once that credulity has been created, my life is in danger. As soon
as I do not know, as soon as I have but belief, I may be moved, and that
movement can always take me all the way to my own death. It means I
can put my trust in something to the point of dying for it.
The death-drive and ideology meet here. The drive of the death-drive
consists in the fact that the credulity cannot be limited, or rather that its
necessarily possible that the vulnerability that comes with uncertainty
will end in death. The drive is that indelible possibility, the tendency
towards risking life. An existential danger derives from the impossibil-
ity of deciding finally on the difference between the truths and fictions
suggested, whether these be suggested to us, by us, or both at the same
time . . . We dont know where repressed material goes, and we cannot
properly identify it. Maybe theres no such thing. Because it cannot
be pinned down, we lose our subjective self-relation, a loss that may
perhaps find some superficial compensation in the adoption of beliefs,
but these beliefs will never be thoroughly appropriated or assimilated by
us. Ideology, in this context, becomes a symptom of not being able to tell
truth from fiction, even and especially for oneself a symptom realised
in the form of beliefs that remain, in principle, bound for death.

A final word about Macbeth. Shakespeare scholars have not been able
to decide on whether the prophetic suggestion made by the weird sisters
to the Thane of Glamis belonged to him originally or not. This is so, in
my view, because it is not possible to decide. Whats more, an intrin-
sic bond ties that openness to Macbeths death, tragically. Tragedy is
another name for the drive toward death that commences once, as sub-
jects, we are unconfined and therefore open to suggestion, or vice versa.
We cant prevent the absolute risk that takes us towards that death and
makes us, perversely, want it.
Notes
1. William Shakespeare, Macbeth (I, iii, 13841), in The Complete Works, eds.
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 979.
2. SE, XXII, p. 46.
3. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and
Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1992), p. 19.
4. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1988).
5. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 48.

Chapter 7
The Rest of Radioactive Light
La matire, tant ternelle, devait avoir des proprits ternelles, comme la

configuration, la force dinertie, le mouvement et la divisibilit. (Voltaire)
The philosopher should begin by meditating on photography, that is the

writing of light, before setting out toward a reflection on an impossible
self-portrait. (Derrida)
Like the light from a dead star, waves still emanate toward us from,
among other times, the early seventeenth century from Shakespeares
Macbeth, for instance, as we saw in the last chapter, or from Hamlet.
In some sense the play remains contemporary with us, though in a sense
quite different from the broadly humanist assertion of its universal and
continuing relevance.
The persistence of an old thing, even a dead one, the continuance
of light over time, the concept of the photograph, the radioactivity
of artworks, Hamlet, Samuel Beckett and, again, Freud these are the
themes I want to braid together in this final chapter. And if it is possible
to combine them (obviously it is) then this possibility itself has some
relevance which can serve as a sort of protocol for what follows: the
condition for combining such historically and culturally different mate-
rial must be a potential contemporaneity of each thing with every other.
Their historical and cultural difference restrains them insufficiently to
stop them coming together. Though time separates Shakespeare and
Beckett, for example, it cannot do so absolutely or there would be no
chance now for a comparative analysis. They can be grafted into the
here and now and onto one another. The past they inhabited and in
which they had their productive origin does not preclude this; it does not
determine them enough to proscribe the contemporaneity which makes
academic discourse about them, together or in isolation, possible and
any approach to such artworks that wishes to remain militantly histori-
cist would have to meet such an objection. One might also note that the

The Rest of Radioactive Light 167
faculty of contemporaneity tolerates in its principle varying degrees of

hybridity and contamination. That is, although it may appear somewhat
random to combine Beckett, Shakespeare and Freud, the contempora-
neity at issue means nothing if not the possibility of remote, perhaps
inappropriate combinations. Once the origin of any one artwork fails
to withstand the artworks departure into another time, anything may
commingle with anything else. Shakespeare becomes our contemporary
not by virtue of remaining who he is, not through any eternal valency,
not through continuing relevance though these things could also be
true no, he becomes contemporary only in the exposure to this risk of
miscegenation and therefore distortion. Shakespeare persists within and
only within the dimension of mutation, continuing in his identity only
to the extent that that identity alters. What persists is both Shakespeare
and not-Shakespeare or rather Shakespeare as necessarily no longer
himself (and therefore as in principle dead). His non-self-identity deliv-
ers him to us. This fact is unpleasant, but it is precisely the unpleasant-
ness which interests me and which will guide these thoughts.
At the heart of these thoughts lies a question as to whether artworks
are live or dead things, whether their capacity to outlive their creators
signals a kind of immortality, and if so whether this should be called
a life or rather a maintained death like that of an Egyptian mummy, a
death kept alive, a kind of life support implying the presence of tech-
nique in the art of survival. It is a difficult question to decide because
despite what I have just claimed as my protocol regarding the necessary
distortion of artworks over time, the more prevalent opinion says more
or less the opposite, that is that a thing remains only insofar as it remains
itself. After all, how can something remain if it remains something other
than itself? Surely that goes against the sense of remaining?1
When Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the death-
drive,2 it is essentially this latter view that underpins it. The state of rest,
for Freud, being the state the death-drive drives toward, presupposes
and implies the self-identity of the thing resting. Moreover, the thing
resting or persisting, the model for which is the organism in his essay,
becomes itself more, achieves a more authentic self-identity, comes into
its own precisely through (a return to) the state of rest. Or at least the
state of rest furnishes those conditions most conducive to the greatest
pleasure (strictly speaking, the least unpleasure) of the organism, where,
as we know, the latter has been defined psychoanalytically as bent on
return to inertia and as such the agent of its own pleasure-seeking or
wish-fulfilment. To the extent it will have exercised maximally such
agency in achieving it, the organism becomes itself fully in the state of
rest. This I call the organisms self-identity though such a term suggests

168 Death-Drive
an ontological and essentialist character not necessarily proper to the

solely hedonist teleology the death-drive orients itself by. Self-identity
and self-pleasure may be separable phenomena: its not for certain a self
that is pleasured by pleasure, for all we can posit is a drive which, qua
drive, qua pulsional force, has perhaps the capacity to disrespect, ignore
or even cancel the selfness of any thing piloted by it.
Roughly speaking, though, Freud gives an account of remaining as
remaining-in-self-identity. The death-drive works for the pleasure of
the organism it navigates by reducing the turbulence around it and
with it the unwelcome infiltrations of alterity in general. Disturbance
comes from the outside, necessarily, even where the outside has been
incorporated; conversely, the inside of the organism maintains its own
undisturbed pleasure (at the more complex, though congruent, level of
the human psyche techniques of repression are used to muffle and bury
outside disturbances these get interiorised radically so as to quarantine
them, making of them an outside within the inside of the mind . . . I
shall come to this in a moment). Insofar as the organism persists undis-
turbed the outside does not affect it, achieving only with and by itself
that repleteness which marks, in effect, the repleteness of itself. The only
problem is that the price paid for this pleasant self-presence is death.
Or is it? A paradox clouds Freuds theory at this point. It seems that
self-identity comes only with its own demise in the form of absolute
inertia. For what does a remaining-in-self-identity amount to if the
whole thing is a resting-in-death? Is self-identity viable as death? Or
more exactly, can death accommodate self-identity without destroying it,
if death derives from the finitude of such presence as makes self-identity
possible? Are the dead more completely themselves than when they
were alive, given that they are now, finally, unreachable by the besetting
othernesses of language, society, love that living will have foisted on
them? All of which begs the reverse question as to whether life and
self-identity therefore repel each other, life constantly drawing the self
away from itself and thrusting it into the a priori space of negotiation
with non-self, jamming its identity and swivelling its privacy round into
the glare of economy.
Insofar as time can be manifested only by change in phenomena, the
lack of change occurring in the pleasurable state of the resting organism,
call it life or death or a half-way house, may provide the illusion of a
timelessness, a possibility which becomes more interesting at the level
of the psyche and I want to move from organic to psychic persistence
as a route to the question of the persistence of artworks (specifically
literary and photographic) and their identity. Freuds point about the
death-drive is that it constitutes a practically unavoidable corollary to

the pleasure principle. We know that the Freudian psyche, primordially

defined by the need to fulfil its wishes (the pleasure principle), learns to
its dismay that this need, or rather the selfish pursuit of its immediate sat-
isfaction, provokes social disapproval and prohibition and is therefore
ineffective. The psyche sees ahead of it an unpleasant detour through the
realm of social compromise and must suffer the agitations of exteriority
where wishes have to be dressed up and socialised a detour unpleasant
enough, in fact, that merely getting back home to itself brings it pleasure,
hence the organic craving for return. Pleasure adds up to no more than
the reduction of the unpleasure felt during this sojourn into the world;
no positive pleasure exists, only the neutral state of least molestation.
Society, as superego, will have imposed mediacy upon the psyche, and
though the maturer psyche will have learned to glean some sublimated
pleasure in this dimension, the sublimation can never shake free from
its representative function that is, sublimation is bound to represent
unconscious wishes in less shameful form, and in fact this bind to the
Unconscious conditions it. The space of mediacy co-extends precisely
with the Unconscious where the wishes are repressed to hide them from
societys disapprobation. This space of mediacy in fact is temporal
after all, there can be no mediation without duration. The mediating of
wish-fulfilment takes time. And the co-extensiveness of repressed wishes
in the Unconscious with the mediation of them in temporal society
implies a certain temporalisation of the Unconscious too. However,
such co-extensiveness of unconscious with superegoic time need not
mean that they age in the same way or have the same duration, for the
co-extensiveness at issue is formal, not phenomenal, and moreover this
distinction between formal and phenomenal even defines them as such: it
holds as a cardinal difference between the two that the superego courses
through the phenomenal realm in social experience whereas the uncon-
scious has an entirely non-phenomenal make-up and so much so that it
requires skilful and often fruitless coaxing psychoanalysis itself to
bring it to light. It would not be too much to say that the non-phenome-
nality of the Unconscious causes psychoanalysis or at least brings it into
being; and that it is intolerance for hiddenness from the phenomenal
realm that stirs psychoanalysis into inventing itself as an art of illumina-
tion and exposure. Psychoanalysis, we might say, itself is an art of light,
a psychophotographics. The superego, being phenomenological, endures
time; the Unconscious, or id, functions as reagent to the enduring, for-
mally temporal because indexed to time but lacking the phenomenal
attributes that would present it in time as such. By way of metaphor one
might say that the Unconscious lies at the relatively still hub of a wheel
whose rim whirrs at the superegoic rate of diurnal change.

170 Death-Drive
In this very specific sense the Unconscious can be called timeless.

Sheltered from atrophy and phenomenal perishing, its slow time has
a kind of Einsteinian viscosity to it that keeps its images forever young
which would corroborate from another, more structural point of
view the inveterate infantilism of the id that Freud will have detailed
from a more genetic one. But in another respect we have strayed from
Freud quite far. For his hypothesis regarding the deathly implications
of the pleasure principle refers much more to ego than id. Really the id
is there to free up the superego for normal social functioning, repress-
ing unseemly wishes while the superego represents them in more decent
form. It is the ego, rather, that has the role of pleasure-seeker, the hedon-
ist, and its stability is what counts. The death-drive protects the life of
the ego, paradoxically, by giving it the chance to shrink from the super-
egoic life-world. Collaterally the id is doing the work that allows the
superego to do the work that allows the ego to get some sublimated
pleasure. Instinct clashes with sublimation, nature with nurture, for the
instinct, the drive of the ego, prefers unsublimated, deathly pleasure
to its sublimated, social representation but just as well the superego
does counter the ego, because left to its own devices the ego would kill
itself in pursuing such raw pleasure. The psyche as a whole judders into
time and is made to live, protecting itself by exhibiting itself (against its
instincts); it may not be given pleasure but it is given life. Being brought
into time, however, includes exposure to mortality, for the subjective
experience of time is atrophy. In gaining life, the psyche also gains death
and there is your side effect, in the bargain which the superegoic pres-
sure of social time forces the psyche into. But at least the bargain has the
merit of moral clarity, and as such contrasts with the ambiguous state
of life-death which as we have seen an unimpeded death-drive as will to
inertia would result in.
The psyche inches forward in a warped frame where time and untime
hold each other to ransom. The normal psyche manages to sacrifice its
yearning for permanence to the interest of daily life, necessity to contin-
gency. (I use the word interest deliberately: the psyche has an interest
in the world insofar as a part of itself, its superego, is already a part of
the world and existing among it (as the etymology of the word inter-
est as inter-esse suggests); the more economistic or speculative aspect
of interest also pertains in that the superego operates as the psyches
bargaining function, ever calculating the ratio of social effort to the
sublimated pleasure it promises.)
At this point and by way of transition, a couple of hypotheses both
pertaining now to the concept of the artwork and both in the form of
analogy:

1. First hypothesis: Interpretation corresponds to the superego. Inter-

pretation can only post-date the artwork it addresses. Empirically, this is
what happens; conceptually, a certain modernity or futurity inheres in the
idea of interpretation, whence perhaps the competitiveness that characterises
it, the urge to colonise the virgin time ahead of it. There will have been time
before interpretation. Interpretation, like the superego, must dwell in a late
time that is also a very new one late because a temporal delay stalls the
getting back to the artwork whose analogue is the wish (neither interpreta-
tion nor superego can close a temporal gap conditioning them); new because
it is late, in fact, where the crisis of lateness turns into the advantage of
newness, that is of inventiveness, adaptability, convention, cunning,
appraisal, opportunity, judgement and so on all those denominations of
both superegoic and interpretative venture.
We may note as a second aspect of this first hypothesis that because

interpretation will have brought the artwork into its own interpretative
time and updated it, it will also be socialising it, or making it conform to
the standards of the day, requiring it to behave conformably to certain
expectations. Interpretation holds the superegoic power of legitimising
the artwork. It will make it answer to certain readerly demands as to
how it presents itself. It will make it acceptable in the cultural terms
prevailing. In this respect interpretation acts as the artworks superego
which tallies with the notion of the superego hawking life to the ego,
for without interpretation, without a certain cognition, without thereby
a risk of (mis)appropriation and self-distortion, the artwork does not
exist (a commonplace of Reception Theory). It also agrees with our
protocol according to which the condition of persistence is alteration,
that only potential mutation makes radioactive permanence a possibil-
ity. One could take the analogy further still to, for example, the play
of superegoic control with egoic and aesthetic pleasure on the part of the
interpreter but this would make an unpleasant digression!
2. Second hypothesis: the will to permanence corresponds to the artwork.

With this hypothesis I wish to embark on the next stage of my argument. It is
another commonplace that an artwork outlives its creator. For sensing just
how commonplace one might try imagining the reverse: what would an
artwork be that died before its creator? This reverse question also reveals
how peculiar, and perhaps inappropriate, a vocabulary of life and death can
be when applied to artworks . . . after all, how does one date the death of,
say, a photograph?
Consider for a moment Derridas work on remaining, resting and the

disfiguration they comport. In particular, I have in mind his reading of
Hamlet in Spectres of Marx.3 The at-first-sight incongruous compara-
tive analysis of Shakespeares play and Marxs (and others) writings

172 Death-Drive
is justified through a common element that of the spectre, precisely.

(Not that this becomes the key to unlocking both texts and not only
because of the necessary obliquity of any reading but also because this
theme itself, if it is one, this concept of the spectre may be just the
sort of thing to tax to its limits any phenomenology of understanding.)
Derridas conceit is that the so-called end of Marxism cannot be so clear
cut, for Marxism, like any cultural phenomenon, any event, had never
been present enough to itself to be able to simply die. It was haunted by
its own non-self-coincidence long before its supposed surcease, hence a
conditioning spectrality which leads Derrida to align or misalign it (the
distinction fades away) with the ghosts of Hamlet.
Non-self-coincidence, it could be argued, produces time. At least, non-
coinciding requires the time in which it does not happen, so to speak.
Conversely, one would not even be able to infer such a thing as time
were it not for the change in phenomena we have already averted to: this
change in phenomena means their non-self-coincidence, their differing
from themselves and postponement thereby of resolute identity. Time
exists nowhere outside such phenomenal change; therefore it is the form
of non-self-coincidence. One implication to be drawn from this which
Derrida draws though from a different angle is that time, as a form
of non-self-coincidence, cannot also take the form of absolute presence,
for non-self-coincidence precludes absolute presence and self-presence.
Time must have only a ghostly quasi-presence. Marxism for instance, as
historical event, can reach a final end no more than any other, and this
includes obsolete events whose death is merely dormancy.
But what of Shakespeares ghosts, be they from Hamlet, Macbeth,
or elsewhere? What of each text as an artwork? True, the ghosts lend
dramatic form to what for Derrida constitutes a structural necessity
so, one could deduce, the plays enact the opposite of drama, the other
pole of presentation and theatre, for its dimension is one of structural
necessity, supposedly pre-phenomenal . . . Such imbrication of structure
and theme applies equally to the inactive persistence not just of the dead
kings ghost but of Prince Hamlet himself both during his postpone-
ment of revenge and in his post-mortem state of silent rest, coupled with
the play itself which in its mutated multiplication lives on across the
western world, thriving so strongly through repetition and allusion that
it would take thousands of deaths to kill it off were that ever possible.
On these grounds there can be no such thing as a Derridean aesthetics,
for the principle of living-on affects artistic and cultural moments
and indeed everyday moments alike; no special case can be made for
artistic timelessness. An artwork forms just another part of its creators
legacy and may be referred to or remembered no more uniquely than his

Samuel Beckett, photographed by John Minihan (1985) John Minihan.

Reproduced with permission.
or her physical image, name, property, etc. I say this with the proviso,
however, that a certain artistry already shapes persistence per se. For if
being-in-time amounts to the risk of certain death, and this is a natural
condition, then persistence through or beyond death implies a certain
technology, artistry, skill a technistic amplification of the natural pos-
sibilities of life that is technology period. For what is technology if not
the magnification of nature beyond its natural limit into the space of
natural death as identical with keeping it alive? At which point technol-
ogy converges with memory: Derrida reveals in Mmoires pour Paul
de Man the untenability of the opposition natural/technical as applied
to human beings, for the faculty of memory which defines them, which
is natural to them, provides a technique for the prolongation of life
through memorialising others (and ones own earlier life).4
A ghost is unnatural in this sense too. It is that prolongation of life
beyond its limit that is identical with memory, with its being-remem-
bered. A ghost that cries Remember me! thus expresses its own condi-
tion. An unremembered ghost does not a ghost make, for it will have
ceased to haunt. In Hamlet, such haunting from the past as beleaguers
the Prince has its parallel in the haunting from the future upon which
he speculates, the dreams in the sleep of death analoguing exactly the
ghost as prolongation-beyond-life of life; in Macbeth, as we saw in the

174 Death-Drive
last chapter, the haunting by the future shapes the heros very thought.
Such residues are nothing but the side effects of life as non-self-
coincidence, the form of time. And we may also redescribe this condition
in the psychoanalytic terms we were using earlier. For it was precisely
non-self-coincidence, as diremption of the psyche, that took form as
time too. The psyche had, through the fabrication of an unconscious, to
become unavailable to itself, beyond its own reach, in order to live in the
temporal world. It had to lose sight of itself, develop an attribute beyond
the apprehension of its very own consciousness, had to agree to schism
of itself, a schism whose cause or effect hard to say which whose
environment could only be time because only time offered the conditions
for mediating the wishes that founded and motivated it. The psyche
began living beyond and after itself. It began living beyond its natural or
instinctual state which was to balk at time altogether. Its living was thus
already living-on or surviving, haunted by its own repressed wishes and
moreover deploying what must be called a technique, that of superegoic
social skill, in order to do so.
In both Freud and Derrida, then, time, non-self-coincidence and tech-
nology come together as inseparable, mutually indispensable notions.
Each is the form of every other. A breach in identity becomes the prereq-
uisite of its own somewhat artificial continuance. It divides itself so as
to remain, like radioactive waste (except that radioactive waste reduces
where identity need not). The difference is that Freud views the whole
scenario as motivated, even defined, by its motivation, for it ensues
from wishing. He will thus have fashioned a metaphysics, a poetics of
origin and origination which Derridas work self-consciously eschews
in favour of a rigorous suspense. Such a metaphysics must evoke the
chance of return for this belongs with the idea of origin. Freudian time,
in other words, has in its very progress the character of potential return;
it harbours the promise of going back as much as forward. The psy-
chological experience of being in time involves being tantalised by this
curvature, this prospect of an alleviating regression and equilibrium. In
both Macbeth and Hamlet this curvature manifests itself perhaps in the
irony of both heroes and their situation: they must go forward in order
to go back, act in order to rest, kill in order to lay the ghost, and this
crisis provokes the ironic attenuation of their thoughts, for irony is both
ahead of its time in its modernity, its fashionability and inventiveness
but pathetic in its harping on the past.
But then both plays and one might venture to say tragedy in general
appear to have this curved shape to them. Insofar as Hamlet drama-
tises a judicial process, the exposing of a crime and its restitution, the
tragedy takes place in view of a return to equilibrium and balance whose

symbolic form would be the scales of justice; in Macbeth, the state of

rest becomes as prized as the crown. More generally still, drama, be it
tragedy or comedy, presents the interruption of a prior, and deferral of
a later, state of rest. The pleasure of drama corresponds to the return to
this latter state as it is played out . . . Though if it is played out we can
revert to Derrida and describe it in non-psychological, non-motivated
terms just as successfully. For what is the playing out if not an exercise
in skill, in the players art which is even advertised within the play itself
? The form of time is mere technique, technique of irony, self-masking,
dissimulation and manipulation. The form of time must be that of
(inexact) simulation, repetition and reproduction if it remains forever
enthralled to its own prior incompleteness in non-self-coincidence. It
will never break free sufficiently to adopt an entirely natural attitude.
A view of the origin always lights up this curvature where time slows,
magnetised by its own anteriority and segmenting identities across itself
like photographs in series become a blur . . . And it is a discussion of
photographs, in fact, I would like to end with, or rather a close reading of
one photograph in particular, of Samuel Beckett taken by John Minihan
in Paris in December 1985.5 In the prose especially one can track a
movement of two-steps-forward-one-step-back, a cautionary need both
syntactically and mentally to monitor by dis and re-assembly the phrasal
units, indistinguishable from physical moments, by which the text makes
its ginger, quizzical progress. Stillness and rest punctuate each phrase;
the sentences caught, like Macbeth or Hamlet, between conclusion and
inconclusion. And like the patterns described by chaos theory, the text
pulls on itself in differing repetition, thus stifling or inhibiting the urge
for inauguration and diminishing the transitivity that signals the pres-
ence of sovereign subjects. Whence the tendency to subsume subjectivity
under textuality, intention under repetition and recapitulation. The texts
lie still, their metabolism thickened almost to congealing point, their
heart-rate as inert as a hibernating animal. Scarcely could the distinction
between living and dying become more mud-like. Here, for example, are
the first dozen lines or so of Still:
Bright at last close of a dark day the sun shines out at last and goes down.
Sitting quite still at valley window normally turn head now and see it the sun
low in the southwest sinking. Even get up certain moods and go stand by
western window quite still watching it sink and then the afterglow. Always
quite still some reason some time past this hour at open window facing south
in small upright wicker chair with armrests. Eyes stare out unseeing till first
movement some time past close through unseeing still while still light. Quite
still again then all quite quiet apparently till eyes open again while still light
though less. Normally turn head now ninety degrees to watch sun which if

176 Death-Drive
already gone then fading afterglow. Even get up certain moods and go stand
by western window till quite dark and even some evenings some reason long
after. Eyes then open again while still light and close again in what if not
quite a single movement almost.6
Still light, he writes, three times. One could perhaps describe these lines
as a photology of the death-drive, the fading maintenance of a late light
that affords some cooling pleasure. The text itself, like the afterglow
of still light, will have styled itself a prolongation-technique. It keeps
the dying light alive, repeating and reproducing it, phrase and image.
This reproduction of light means that the phrases are almost literally
photographing each other, sending out small flashes in the gloom of
the prose. It is so technical, so mechanical, this life-support system that
one calls a text, and finds its figure perhaps in the robotic comic lyri-
cism of a phrase like, Normally turn head now ninety degrees to watch
sun which if already gone then fading afterglow. There you have the
becoming-technical of life, where life means both subjective humanity
and simulating text, and where the technique allows for both experience
and re-experience of a dying light that has sustained its life and which
in its very dying is giving pleasure from its impossible lyricism and
beauty. Repeated fading light as pleasure, still light. Its tragic poeti-
cism thereby includes comedy by default, the pleasure as technique for
survival including a certain comedy, for the technological prolongation
of life suggests a kind of disrespect for organic living, an intolerance for
it which allows inhuman mechanisms to have their day, incongruous in
their garish efficiency and stupidity.
Now if we turn to the photograph we see this still light in another
form. A photograph maintains light over time, the rest of light, the
leftover of it together with its repose in aesthetic form. It is a technical
means of keeping light alive as image in time. Samuel Beckett lives on
in this photograph and thus outlives himself, and if this is possible then
there must have been a difference between himself and himself allowing
for that discrepancy. By way of analogy the photograph corresponds to
the proper name according to Derridas analysis of it: both photopor-
trait and proper name appear identical to their subject but in fact are
perfectly detachable. Neither need die with the death of their subject and
to this extent must have been and remain independent of that subject.
Neither can take us to the subjects identity, and for the further reason
that just as the question is this Samuel Beckett? may refer merely to the
name of the name of Samuel Beckett and one will never know so the
same question as applied to this photograph, is this Samuel Beckett?,
refuses to yield its equivocation, for it is both Samuel Beckett but at the

same time only a photograph of him. The artifice, the phototechnique,

at once frustrates and sustains the identity.
One notices immediately an aesthetic trick or innovation or anti-
classical ruse the photoportrait was taken landscape rather than
portrait style (horizontal rather than vertical). Where portrait style
accommodates and enhances the self-possession of its subject, flatter-
ing its egological humanism and sovereignty, a portrait taken landscape
style immediately throws its subject into the world, levelling it both lit-
erally and phenomenologically. This takes emphasis in the photograph
before us from the shunting to one side of the subject instead of its
occupying the centre, which makes room for the perspective in the left-
hand portion of the frame. In addition to these elements of deprecation
the subject stands at the right side of the frame where we normally read
photographs from the left, so again a certain loss of priority is implied.
These elements create a pathos and worldliness, an everyman disprivilege
borne out further by the quotidian, vaguely laboristic or at most casual
clothing that Beckett wears, and the humdrum blankness of the grey
weather that could betoken just about any time of day. His somewhat
peasant air meets both corroboration and contrast in its background,
for while the trees in the avenue leading away or toward him give a
rustic sense, their height and line, measured along with tall buildings
and lamps, provide a grandeur and Parisian elegance that lend Becketts
presence by contrast an unease and inappropriateness. The intensity of
Becketts expression, again one of both peasant or highlander or shep-
herd asceticism blended with intellectualist acumen, also carries this
contrast with the confident stroll of the avenue behind, the insouciance
of what looks like a river walk set against the subjects apparent loneli-
ness, though in a sense the eyes also concentrate that measured pace as
the point or punctum as Barthes would put it7 where the photograph
converges: the avenue leads calmly into those eyes and is gathered there.
The eyes gain elevation from the height in the perspective behind and
this reinforces their quality as birdlike, meditatively preyful, centring
a head that is equally birdlike with its crows feet, sharp, beaked nose,
feather of hair, thinness, brittleness and hardness. These latter elements
of concentration, and particularly Becketts position in the frame which
itself becomes an internal frame, an internal lower-right corner, bring
the subjects presence forward almost out of the photograph: an effect of
ontological prominence is won even as it is lost on account of the previ-
ous elements mentioned. Overall the photograph works by an equivocal
motion of simultaneous subdual and intensification of subjectivity (in a
manner reminiscent of Van Gogh).
There are also issues of survival and light that are raised by this

178 Death-Drive
portrait, thus corresponding to the text of Still. Already there exists a

connection, however, in a further play of subjectivitys equivocal status.
The avenue as movement, the bust as stillness, these are the competing
energies of the picture, just as Still pivots between fixity and growth
whereby subjectivity is inferred more from the transitions around it,
from the motion or change in its ambient light, than from its own inten-
tional properties; in the photograph the blurring of the background,
combined with the sense of progression and procession, traffic and
ambulation afforded by the avenue, puts a kind of speed into the picture
against which the arrested stillness of the subject also achieves some
kind of acceleration, as though he has been fired to the front of it. This
dual play expresses itself too in the meshing of fatigue and alertness in
the face, suggestive of a life as survival. In this respect the river walk, if
it is a river, the promenade is less recreational it is cold, for Beckett
wears a scarf and there are no leaves on the trees and more one of
self-subsistence and endurance, making the subject tramp-like, wizened.
Agedness factors into this aspect of survival, in the lines of the desiccated
face, a sense of living beyond oneself, just beyond the minimum, that
ties in with the general absurdity of contingency that so marks Becketts
written work. Contingent too because of the hollowness of the day in the
photo, the aimlessness of a man free to promenade in the day, free from
appointments and the necessities of economic life and yet beset by them,
forced to the side of his own life by them, compelled to be out in the
world, literally outside and in the phenomenal realm as surviving. Such
would be the grey light of the superego which has dragged the psyche
into the realm of uncertain satisfaction, carrying its interiority forth into
the public realm as this shot depicts. Becketts closed privacy is exposed
in the most public air of a boulevard which even then fails to console
on account of its apparent emptiness and depopulation, where Paris
resembles an Eastern European communist capital more than itself. And
what maintains this state and prolongs it is the stare into the camera
lens itself, the interface with the technical that keeps the subject stopped
in its course through the outside. Beckett stops to present himself to
the camera, there is the time of a technical interruption where Beckett
becomes himself before the apparatus, framed and therefore different,
distinct from the Beckett he was until a moment ago.
Within this technical space a certain infinity opens up. It is figured in
the photo itself in several ways in the preservation of the aged face we
have already noted, also in the long march of the avenue disappearing
perspectivally like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and, with
the lamplight to the left of Becketts head, the possible configuring of
him as a sentry on a vigil going to and fro from the light with his slightly

Roman air, or even as a prisoner taking exercise along a meaning-

lessly demarcated stretch of road, or a ghost emerging from the nebula.
Here is a still light: that lamp, is it on or is it off? The light seems to
remain in the half-light of those days when it never gets bright enough
for the lamps to sense the difference from evening. The camera then
photographs this remaining light and keeps it alive.
Above all one feels perhaps the photographs ashen texture, where
heat and light have been burnt out, and where the whiteness, like the
whiteness of Becketts hair, signals both decay and a parodically new
steady state. It has come into time in order to resist time and perhaps
exemplifies how artworks as technological constructs and as such
no longer to be distinguished sharply from the living deploy their
structure.
Notes
1. An aporia rules over this question inasmuch as two contradictory criteria
must be met in order for self-identity to remain. On the one hand, as our pro-
tocol proposes, self-identity must offer itself up to distortion in order to survive
in time it must survive as something other than itself; but on the other hand
yet at the same time identity may be inferred (and this is the more classical
argument) only from the integrity over time of the thing in question.
2. SE, XVIII, pp. 167.
3. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London:
Routledge, 1994).
4. See Jacques Derrida, Mmoires pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galile, 1988).
5. Samuel Beckett: Photographs by John Minihan (London: Secker & Warburg,
1995), p. 85.
6. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose 19451980 (London: John Calder,
1984), p. 183.
7. See Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1980).

Postscript
Approaching Death
I stand before a monk who stands before me.

Mnch is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, first exhibited in the pre-
millennial year of 1999. It is polyester, painted a matt black, and meas-
ures 192 cm by 63 cm by 46 cm life size being a cast of the artists
friend, Frank Fenstermacher (a richly appropriate name, perhaps, for
this candid window-maker has provided the raw material for a uniquely
opaque object).
I have seen it twice, in different galleries, though it feels more apt to
say that I have visited it twice, or even visited him twice, except that, on
the second occasion, the recognition belonged solely to me (thats part
of an essential asymmetry we shall explore that this artwork was not
capable of recognising me as I recognised it). The word visit might be
a kind of key to the preceding chapters of this book. I visited the monk,
which means that I saw him visit derives from the Latin verb videre,
to see. But visit, at least in English, contains a peculiar counter-current
of the invisible. It touches on visitation with its sense of supernatural
presence, a presence that is there without being evident. This sense of
the supernatural, or of an event that arrives obscurely from elsewhere,
perhaps somewhere frightening, also imbues visit when used, albeit
archaically, as a verb, as in vengeance was visited upon them. So, I
visited the monk twice, and each time I both did and did not see him.
Even as he stood there exhibited, as he submitted to my gaze and that
of a thousand other eyes, alongside his vulnerability and complicity
sounded another tone, more imperious, that made it clear that Mnch
could not be, and would never be, completely seen. That tone owed to
more than the absorbing, denying, forbidding blackness of the figure. I
could visit him a million times and never thoroughly have visited him.
Why does that offer a clue about death? Because we both visit death
and are visited by it. We observe it when we see someone die, and we
visit it with thoughts and speculations. But even in these visits, we never

actually see it. One cannot point at death: no apodictic register exists
in which to proclaim its appearance. We can point at pictures and other
representations, or may witness events of death such as murders, acci-
dents or warfare, but in all these death never appears as such. It may be
(see Chapter 1, Memento Mori) that individuals see death in the hour
of their dying, but by definition we have no report of what that death
looked or felt like, for those individuals are now gone and I do not
count near-death experiences, nor the accounts gleaned from them, on
the criterion that death must be absolutely irreversible. Something about
death makes it invisible and unvisitable, which is why visit helps as a
term, signalling this absence of death even at the site of its own occur-
rence. We may visit death, but when we find ourselves visited by it, it
remains strangely inapparent.
Fritschs sculpture makes especially intense the play, common perhaps
to all sculptures that represent people, between the quick and the dead,
and this provides a second key. We should not automatically take death
to be the reverse of life, and I dont mean simply because we are mortal.
Our mortality suggests that death completes life, bringing it to a close,
rather than facing it as its opposite, and we have our being on the condi-
tion it is finite. So the two, life and death, already envelop each other,
and it would be foolish to maintain that either could exist independ-
ently. Some might construe their interdependence diacritically, that is
in the same way you cant think black without white, you cant think
life without death. I have no objection to such statements of an intrin-
sic connection, nor to the theoretical developments in recent decades
regarding memory and mourning and the irreducible confusion in those
states between life and death: how, for example, are the dead kept alive
by us, and in us, through our memories of them? If we can remember
them, and could have remembered them, moreover, even before their
demise, does that not imply they were dead in our memory long before
the end of their days?1 Again, life and death seem only to infiltrate each
other. But if they truly are so enmeshed in each other, Fritschs sculpture
leads us to that conclusion along a rather different path. Just as much as
it says something about sculptural bodies as alive and breathing, Mnch
tells us something about human bodies as deathly. Of course it has long
been a commonplace in discourses on art to praise the apparent breath-
ingness of the sculpted body or the illusion of wind moving among
garments (a metaphorical association with God breathing life into
man never lags far behind), and one could easily press Mnch into the
service of such a discourse, not least because it enjoys the advantage of
having been cast from a real person the verisimilitude only intensifies
its uncanny presence. So far, so classical. But the inverse possibility has

182 Death-Drive
yet to be accepted or even mooted very much, namely that the life and
breath of the beholder, rather than that of the sculpture, becomes the
issue, thus rendering the relationship of sculpture to beholder, of inani-
mate to animate, less one of difference than of shared features, as in a
Venn diagram with overlapping circles. For in the semi-mirroring effect
involved in looking at a life-like, life-size sculpture, and in the stillness or
arrest that the sculpture induces in the beholder, a kind of reverse energy
flows. As he comes alive, so I become dead. The figure indeed arrests
me, demonstrating in a particularly tensile manner how all formal art-
works appear to (want to) arrest us; it makes the artistic arrest acute: it
stops us. And as we freeze or slow before it a thicker time-zone exists
around him, a different gravity or viscosity we endure a ceremonious-
ness now proper to both of us, sculpture and beholder. The quality of
our own aliveness mutates, pulled toward a slow, simple coincidence
with the sculpture, one that begins to be quite deathly, more like a
Mit-Tod than a Mitsein. Which is partly to do with the breath: the sculp-
ture reflects back on the automatism of breathing that belongs to live
human beings, a mechanism in every sense at the heart of being, and so
reframes us, in turn, as deathly and even technological in the suppos-
edly vital moment of respiration. Hence the second key: our death-in-life
experience increases in artistic/formal/technical encounters.
For it is precisely a matter of form, art and technology. Not only
can artworks seem alive (they moved or seemed to move, to quote
Yeats),2 and thereby throw doubt on the relationship between life
and death, but conversely, though more controversially, our lives by
which I mean human being may contain artistic, formal or techni-
cal elements that tie them back to death in ways still little explored. I
combine artistic, formal or technical, fully recognising that these may
constitute an unlikely or even incompatible grouping (not that similar
groupings have not been made before I am thinking of two seminal
texts, Paul Celans The Meridian and Walter Benjamins The Work
of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction).3 In my eyes, what the
artistic, the formal and the technical share is repeatability, and indeed
what makes breathing technical, despite variations in its rhythm, is its
machine-like or technical repetitiousness and endurance. Whats techni-
cal can be repeated, such as a computer program, and whats formal
can be repeated, such as the steps of a dance. The case of the artwork is
more problematic. For a start, it can be repeated in the sense that, once
made, it embodies a style, an artistic way of seeing or being, and in
this it sets down its own imitability, thereby allowing it to be repeated
which is ironic because a style connotes something original or unique,
yet that individuality is precisely what allows it to be identified and

thus reproduced. But there is something else, and it is where a third key
from Katharina Fritsch comes in. That ceremoniousness felt within the
monks radius also points towards ritual and repetition. On the surface,
such repetition might have a solely religious character the repetition of
words in prayer, for example, or the monastic routine. Beneath that, this
figure indicates what I would call the eternal return of the death-drive or,
in more strictly Freudian terms, the compulsion to repeat. Though the
monk stands there in his singularity, isolate and discrete, he nevertheless
seems caught in a sequence not just that of a religious observance, nor
even that owing to the sculptures being a cast and so suggesting infinite
reproduction, but rather an insistence, even a law, of repetition, and of a
repetition that leads not to any illumination or any growing knowledge,
but merely to an innocuous and ongoing positing or repositing of itself.4
The monk can posit himself again and again without any content accru-
ing to him, so to speak, without any abounding of character, without
any shoring up of identity. Its like the repetition of a zero, or at least a
minimal quiddity, the pulsing of a near-nothing, which makes me think
of it as a kind of rhythm of death. It connects with the notion of the
visit, for even if a visit appears to have been undertaken volitionally, it
always takes place in response to some prior recognition of a duty, itself
an instance, therefore, of a law of repetition. It requires that we come
forward and present ourselves, but nothing further. The visit has a non-
appetitive rhythm that corresponds to the continuous falling-into-place
of Mnch.
These keys from Katharina Fritsch are no more than that. I believe
that Mnch concentrates a number of issues concerning the death-drive
that accord with the tenor and thematics of this book. And although they
lie outside my scope it also brings up a range of moral questions: that
rope around the waist, for example it suggests asceticism, it suggests
church bells, but it also suggests the hangmans noose and the sexual
fetish. The clothing may be as much costume as professional uniform,
which calls to mind a mimicry and an auto-eroticism that undermine the
religious vocation. And while I would not say that Mnch stands beyond
good and evil, I would claim that it confounds the two, in every sense
. . . My focus has fallen instead on the aesthetic, the philosophic and the
psychoanalytic, and I would say that they are supported in turn by three
pillars, each lying somewhere between thesis and hypothesis. These
are not always exposed and explicit more like sunken foundations
propping up the rest:
1. The concept of death if a concept it be remains for necessary

reasons beyond our conceptual reach, despite the prodigious

184 Death-Drive
intellectual effort spent to that end, and yet we can maintain a certain
thinking relationship with it.
2. Freuds notion of the death-drive in all its counter-intuitive force
still stands as perhaps the critical imperative in the field of philoso-
phies of death in modern times, and as such demands painstaking
elaboration and interrogation.
3. The death-drive bears an inward relation to what we think of as aes-
thetics, namely those objects and experiences related to pleasure,
form, involvement and alienation that sport a special cultural mark
upon them.
Does that read like a late modernist agenda? Many of the primary
ingredients are there death, psychoanalysis, art. Late modernist or
not, it still bursts with issues and questions that we are still only at the
beginning of. Take only Freud: his work comes in and out of fashion,
praised and blamed, but either way it provides a capital so constantly
and so ingeniously reinvested, be it negatively (American feminism,
for example) or positively (poststructuralism), that it becomes hard to
imagine a real end of Freud, that is not just that point at which various
thinkers and writers declare the end (always a sign of its continuing
vigour), but where his work no longer prompts criticism or reference.
That seems a long way off. Where would debates around our times be
in the absence of a more or less tacit reference to Freudianism? Can we
imagine a modernity without some invocation, albeit subtle, displaced
and equivocal, of the unconscious? How would we fare if we could not
avail ourselves of this term or the range of meanings it imparts? Has the
unconscious manipulated, to be sure, in a variety of psychoanalyti-
cally doctrinal and post-doctrinal ways not come to form some kind
of predicate to the way in which we anatomise the social, political and
intersubjective world? Even in its most dilute form that of implicit
subjective knowledge the concept of the unconscious continues to
influence our propositions regarding action and thought in the human
dimension. And as for the death-drive, to say nothing of the larger ques-
tion of death in general, it has a pertinence that flies at the body as well
as the mind, attacks us as beings and provokes us in a relentless and
quite uncontrollable way, whether we let it or not.
The unthinkable
A moment ago, looking at Fritschs sculpture (in fact a copy of a photo-

graph of it), I mentioned a non-appearance strangely bound up with the

visit or visitation of death. When we see death happen, we never see

death as such. Of course, I can think about death. I can think about the
deaths of certain people; I can speculate on a life beyond; I can enumer-
ate the things that will no longer be present; I might even be able, in a
squinting sort of way, to picture a nothingness. But death as such never
makes itself present. Its peculiar non-appearance in a Heideggerian
vein one might refer to it as deaths withdrawal has far-reaching con-
sequences for our sphere of knowledge as human beings. The fact that
death, in some strong sense, does not appear even when it appears
to, so to speak establishes a limit both to our knowledge of death in
particular, but also, consequently, to the empire of our knowledge in
general.
So where is death when death takes place? Perhaps nowhere perhaps
death is just the lazy, aggregate name we give the set of circumstances
surrounding someones ceasing to live. Perhaps there is no death at all,
merely the stopping of life. Yet this stopping is unlike any other. Its not
like stopping the car at the end of the drive or stopping a subscription to
a magazine, which are contingent events more or less in ones control.
Even events that lie beyond ones control would still be contingent to the
extent that they didnt absolutely have to happen. But the stopping of
life had or has to happen, incontrovertibly and non-negotiably, and it is
here, in this necessity, that the unthinkability resides.
Let us say, as a first fence-post in the snow, that thought takes place
where some innovation has occurred a new combination in conscious-
ness of data, a change of conceptual state, some recomposition of
noumena. By contrast, if all I do when allegedly thinking or engaging
in thought is to repeat a formula, then I cannot be said to be thinking.
For example, if in admonition I quote to a friend the proverb, People
in glass houses shouldnt throw stones, I am not thinking so much as
parroting a sentiment I may have brought the sentiment to mind and
applied it appropriately, even skilfully, but I am adding nothing to it.
There is no dialectic in the phrase for me, so to speak, nothing that has
made it active, no tension. I am merely mouthing a clich. Saying this,
of course, upholds a deeply conservative argument with its roots in
Platonism. It corresponds to saying that to study History properly one
should avoid cramming lists of monarchs, because that doesnt get you
thinking about history, it just equips you with a mechanical skill and a
means of passing exams. But we can extend the argument to what we
could label the epistemology of death. One way of doing this would be
to espouse the Derridean claim that the quotability of words so informs
them that authentic, owned, intentional, conscious speech is never fully
achievable because each word and phrase I use may be quoted again,

186 Death-Drive
and will have always been subject to such grafting, as Derrida puts
it, that I can never fully own what I say.5 To this extent I could never
own, nor by extension truly know, the list of monarchs I may want to
rehearse. The quotability of that list deprives me of its knowledge . . . Be
that as it may, my hypothesis says something different: the reason that
thinking about death cant be possible is that thought constitutes a form
of freedom, whereas death is nothing if not freedoms end. Only when
it deviates from a predictable or programmable deduction does thought
begin, and in this respect differs from what we call logic and perhaps
even from reason in general. For each kind of logic has barely greater
status than a convention or norm. Two plus two equals four, for
example, has the ring of logic but, once we appreciate other, competing
logics, begins to look arbitrary. Mathematically it may be logical, but in
George Orwells 1984, for example, two plus two equals whatever the
Party wants it to equal. Or, according to psychoanalysis, two plus two
might equal a psychological representation that fits with the psyche at
hand: it might equal orange, for example, or my memory of school,
which mathematically may be preposterous but would psychologically
be right and to that extent logical for a given person. Obeying the rules
within a logical convention, be it mathematical or otherwise, amounts to
no more than precisely that; thought has not yet taken place. What does
take place under the name of logical thinking would therefore be less a
case of a thinking person operating the concepts or terms of the logic at
hand, and more a case of that logic operating the person. For thought to
be thought a real manipulability of concepts or terms will be requisite,
which means that thought has to be counter-conventional. Up to that
point, whatever we call thought is largely the practice of a more or less
adept but unconscious or complicit application of conventional rules.
I argue the point in Chapters 2 and 5, The Death-drive Does Not
Think and Literature Repeat Nothing, where thought turns out to
be a rare commodity indeed. After all, how often do we deviate in any
meaningful way from a conventional logic or the grammar of thinking
through which we communicate? From a psychoanalytic perspective it
would even be preferable not to think, because to think would occa-
sion the kind of challenge, novelty, exertion and difference that the
ego is always at pains to forestall. The ego wants an easy life, whereas
thought, as here defined, places upon it a burden. Whats more, if
thought implies breaking from convention, then around that prospect
of thinking gather certain cultural or societal risks. Thinking might
jeopardise ones belonging to the group, with all the real and imagined
dangers that implies. It might involve going out on a limb, even embrac-
ing some sacrificial role. Yet on the other hand, psychoanalysis at least

in my reading of it construes the ego as a laudably thinking entity.

The ego does want an easy life, no question, but it also wants a pleasur-
able one, a need which taxes it with the never-ending task of appraising
and calculating where it will get that pleasure from. You may say this
kind of obsessive hedonism doesnt count as thinking in any noble or
dialectical sense it certainly has none of the feeling of free, democratic
intercourse, the gradual development of social enlightenment or the
perfection of the mind that are all associated with thinking but it does
make of that ego a subtle, quick, alert, precise capability responding in
real time to micro changes in its pleasure-environment which may as
well be thought under another guise.
In this almost feral form of thinking, we at least the egoic part of
us will indeed be thinking about death, but not in any philosophic
or discursive way. We will be constantly negotiating our preservation
and pleasure, but the thought of death as a grand metaphysical object
washes away beyond our view. Again this is because death sinks back
into the cloak that necessity throws over it. To understand this invisible
necessity, imagine three orders of freedom of thought, with death at the
apex:
1. At the lowest level, a fairly unencumbered freedom of thinking exists

the kind of thinking that, within the bounds of convention, allows
us to think about this or that: no special injunction, beyond such
convention, proscribes the liberty of our thoughts. We might think
banal thoughts about the shopping we need for the weekend, or
subtle thoughts about the nature of colour indeed, pretty much all
of our thinking takes place at this level.
2. At the next level up, our freedom encounters the constraint of law.
The law Thou shalt not kill, for example, does not prevent us from
thinking about what the law means, what killing is, our moral
responsibilities, and so on we can continue, in other words, to prac-
tise a great deal of our base-level thinking in relation to it but at the
same time, qua law, its function with regard to thought is to neutral-
ise it. Youre not supposed to think about it, youre just supposed to
do it its the law, and ipso facto holds a kind of diplomatic immu-
nity from thoughts confrontations. The law cant exactly stop us
thinking about it in the ordinary way, but because its law theres a
point at which that ordinary thinking becomes irrelevant and must
give over. Its lawness, having been established, spares it from the
sphere of negotiation and the thinking that goes with it. Just to be
clear: no law like this, no matter how universal, ever eradicates the
possibility of thought around it, ever excludes the chance of

188 Death-Drive
resistance or thinking resistance or even thinking-as-resistance to it.

Equally, no law will ever achieve the absoluteness of force to finally
preclude or prevent the non-compliance that begins the moment that
thought, rather than obedience, responds to it. And yet, despite this
leakiness in its structure, the law is law only when thought is control-
led, limited, proscribed, prohibited, constrained by it. In this respect
every law speaks with two voices for, in addition to asserting its own
particular edict (Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt have no other
gods, or whatever) it also whispers, as a kind of reminder inscribed
within it, and by the way, dont think about this. One might object
that laws are created in the first place out of thought and sober analy-
sis, but, once set down, part of the function of law must be to para-
lyse thinking. So at this second level an awkward structural tension
plays over thinking and its space to perform.
3. But at the next level, the apex, that tension has disappeared, and its
precisely why and where thought reaches an impasse. With death
arrives a law of a higher order. Thou shalt die has never needed to
be set down as law. What can thought do to play against it? How can
it resist, object, intervene, negotiate? Its not even as if thought as
in the previous level has been excluded from the scene; rather, it
holds no place at all, not even the place of exclusion. It keeps all its
other freedoms, its lower-order freedoms, but on death, thought
simply has no purchase. At this level, thinking and law pass each
other by, without relation. The unsurpassable necessity of deaths
law disables all thought in a gesture of total privation, with the
paralysis started up at the previous level now complete. Voiceless
and futile, thought stumbles against its own boundary in the shape of
necessity.
This last point is important to bear in mind in when considering death

and the death-drive: death is not an object but a law, and these are
quite different. The reason that thinking about death defeats, amazes or
confounds us lies not in its being an unusually intractable concept, one
that stretches our ratiocinative capacities to their limit, but in its having
no conceptual profile, lacking both phenomenal and noumenal features.
Which is not to say that proxies for thinking about death cannot be
found we have metaphors and personifications and narratives and
images aplenty but proxies are all they ever will be, and no metaphor
will ever ferry us across to the real thing. Death has no Ding an sich even
though, as Kant might also say, the metaphors do help us to think about
it or at least, they help us to think we can think about it, even though
we cant. Where death goes, thought may follow with its metaphoric

lights, but the darkness that is deaths necessity will always consume
them. It boils down to saying that the thought of death is impossible,
and therefore death has never been thought and no thought of death has
ever been had not once.
But we dont have to take that as the last word. Despite the impos-
sibility of thinking death, we are human beings I should say human
animals only as subjects of the law Thou shalt die. We will die, and
so we bear a relation to that necessity. It may not be based in thought,
but it is there and it cannot be gainsaid. But if not based in thought,
what is the nature of that relation? To answer this, one might reach for
existentialist language. One might say that though incapable of thinking
death, we suffer the fact, idea or affect of death in fear and trembling.
One might analyse the game of ultimate stakes involved in the relation
to death, attempt the calculation of lifes meaning and value vis--vis a
beyond, describe the economy of that speculation. An existentialist reg-
ister such as this and I am thinking of the great existentialist philoso-
phers, from Pascal to Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Sartre can take us a
long way in appreciating deaths affect, and it may furnish the tools to
measure ultimate values, but these are also its limitations. By transliter-
ating death into a token, a marker of value against which, for example,
faith or reason can be weighed, it staves death within an essentially
fixed scale of permutations. It makes death legible at what is, after all,
a somewhat pragmatic or ethical level, providing an indication of how
best to live ones life under the conditions of mortality. Not a great deal
of difference applies between this methodology and that of approaching
death by way of metaphor and image, for in both cases death as such has
not been thought, but rather a value has been assigned to it that gives it
some conceptual substance and makes it workable. That is all well and
good but I believe, by contrast, that despite its unthinkability one can
still approach death without pulling such tricks of transliteration; that
for all its unthinkability, for all its necessity and incommutability and
without recourse to existentialist gestures death may be thought; and
that the impossibility of thinking it does not, perversely, precludes its
possibility. How can this be?
We cannot think death because thought requires some freedom or lati-
tude that death cannot grant it. We can claim some freedom by thinking
existentially or metaphorically about death, that is by buying translitera-
tions or tokens of death that give it a working thinkability, but the cost
of that freedom is a loss of immediacy that puts us at a remove from it.
Nor, on the other hand, could death be said to be a thing in itself avail-
able to apperception, so even getting back to some immediacy wouldnt
help death would not suddenly reveal itself. Where does that leave us?

190 Death-Drive
I know I must die, but I cant really think about it as such. However,
I am indebted I have my life on condition that I pay for it with my
death, which means that I am in debt. One could even say that I am is
shorthand for I am indebted. A gap opens, in this debt, for observance
and recognition. This does not mean that literally I observe my debt by
undertaking minor rituals, for example, or offering libations nor that I
recognise it in any cognitive fashion. Rather I am bestowed with a deep
attitude of observance and recognition towards it one might even call
it respect. Insofar as I am indebted, I respect my death, but this respect
goes on at a different level from existential cognition or affect its not
something that ever becomes an object of thought either. And this is
where the thought of death becomes thinkable again, even in its impos-
sibility. For this fundamental observance, recognition and respect entail,
alongside the absolute acceptance of and obedience to deaths necessity
alongside, that is, a kind of infinite passivity and slavish vulnerability
to deaths power a second, irregulable element that makes these things
(observance, recognition and respect) what they are. For observance to be
observance, recognition recognition, and respect respect, some minimal
agreement or consent must have been given on my part in other words
some freedom must have belonged to me even in the midst of my utter
lack of choice or freedom in the face of death. I am absolutely indebted
to death for my life, but in the observance of that debt, and in my recog-
nition of and respect for it, I have also established a relation and I have
also offered some consent not in any intentional way, to be sure in
order for that debt to stand as debt. It is here in this prior freedom and
consent everywhere bound by constraint and debt that I locate a dif-
ferent kind of thinking of death, and perhaps a different order of think-
ing altogether. Theres nothing I can do to bring this state of affairs into
consciousness, and to that extent I will never think it according to any
accepted usage of that term, but my position of freedom as represented
by the consent I give means that some live relay is at work between me
and my death and in it I am thinking. (Chapter 4, White Over Red,
was trying to understand how artworks are capable of thinking too.)
Patently, such thinking has little in common with the manipulation
of concepts ordinarily denoted by the word, and its field of operation
is highly circumscribed. But it seems to me that one can hardly think
about death without thinking about the thinking about death, for death
stirs up and antagonises the field of epistemology possibly more than
anything else we could cite. At the very least, it forces us beyond received
ideas about thinking as a form of instrumental or technical control of
matter as if it were another form of industry. In short, death makes us
think, but in ways we have barely begun to understand or articulate.

The death-drive
Freuds work on the death-drive provides a frame of reference through-

out the preceding pages, of course, and though the phrase death-drive
has pretty much entered common parlance, its edge has blunted, and I
think is worth trying to restore its sharpness, however momentarily.
It is startling, and startlingly perverse. Death-drive. Todestrieb. Why,
other than for reasons of honour (military, political, religious, etc.),
would one drive toward death? For the death-drive refers not to a wish
for the death of others but of the self. Yet this attraction never comes
before us as desirable as such; even for Freud, it would be impossible for
anyone ever to want death; and even in cases of honour, its the honour
thats desirable, not the death as such. Chapter 3, A Subject Is Being
Beaten, develops the point but let us remind ourselves briefly: the ego
could never, strictly speaking, solicit death for itself. The ego wants only
to preserve itself, perhaps to expand or to reproduce itself, but above all
to avoid the unpleasure of which, presumably, death would count as
the arch example. This explains why, despite an emerging theory of the
death-drive, Freud has such a ticklish time accounting for suicide. How
could even one suicide ever take place if, as psychoanalysis contends, the
ego without exception finds ways of doing whats best for itself? Freud
answers that the suicide does not actually kill the self but a representa-
tion of something or someone else that he or she taken on. For example,
an adolescent boy might kill the child he believes his father hates and
whom the boy embodies. The boys actions must be viewed as sadistic,
outward-focused, directed away from the true self and towards this
adopted or conferred image.
So the death-drive, first and foremost, must be sharply distinguished
from suicide despite the fact that it concerns the death of the self. Nor,
on the other hand, does the death-drive signal a death-wish in the form
of willing the death of others. Self, however, stands out as the problem
term because it yokes together unconscious and conscious motives
whereas, for Freudian psychoanalysis, it is precisely the separation of the
two that creates the original possibility of a death-drive. The ego, con-
sciously, will never and could never court its own death, but that doesnt
tell the whole story. The death-drive begins with and in the unconscious.
A death-drive asserts itself and motivates us, but not consciously indeed
the concept of a death-drive cannot work without the complementary
concept of the unconscious, that is an agency in the psyche structur-
ally at odds with conscious or avowed intention. At a methodological
level, the death-drive even has an analytic function, in that it decouples
unconscious from conscious and affirms their difference. Having said

192 Death-Drive
that, the death-drive marks a crossroads not only where unconscious

and conscious diverge, but also where they come together, for what the
ego consciously seeks is identical to what the unconscious seeks too,
meaning that conscious and unconscious blend once more though not
into any autarkic self.
And just to remind ourselves, for one last time, of the original words:
In the theory of psychoanalysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the
course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure prin-
ciple. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably
set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such
that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with
an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. In taking that course
into account in our consideration of the mental processes which are the
subject of our study, we are introducing an economic point of view into our
work.6
Freud intends to make a step beyond the pleasure-principle, and in

an almost ingratiating, brokering manner, keen to manage his readers
expectations, he starts in this opening paragraph of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle to build his case. Psychoanalysis is nothing without the theory
of wish-fulfilment, here identified as the pleasure principle, and this
keystone is invoked as if reconfirming first principles. Somewhat sur-
reptitiously, however, Freud appears to have switched his definition of
the wish from positive to negative, whereby the mind at the centre of
those mental events, now flipped to reactive or passive mode, responds
to unpleasurable tension that must be lowered, rather than seizing the
initiative to pursue pleasure off its own bat. The definition is the same
but different not pleasure but the absence of unpleasure, the glass
half empty and once that subtle adjustment has been made, all else
follows. Some see in this shift of emphasis from 1919 a sign of postwar
pessimism, but whatever its context, only a short step or two now stand
in the way of an irresistible conclusion: the lowering of that tension
knows no limits and why after all would one lower unpleasurable
tension only so far? and so, ineluctably, it arrives at the lowest tension
of all, the absolutest inertia, that is death. Freud has in effect drafted a
syllogism: (1) the mind wishes to avoid unpleasure; (2) the avoidance of
unpleasure is best represented by death; (3) therefore the mind wishes
for death.
To speak for a second the language of chaos theory, one would have
to keep revisiting this opening paragraph in order to understand the
sensitive dependence of the theory of the death-drive upon these initial
conditions. That is, the theory of the death-drive would not indeed be
possible, or at least as apparently felicitous (despite Freuds egregious

Katharina Fritsch, Mnch (1999) DACS 2009. Reproduced with

permission.
hesitations), unless that first conversion of the wish, from active pursuit
to reactive avoidance, had been effected. To be fair, Freud does write, in
the quotation above, of an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of
pleasure (my italics) as if exchangeable like for like, but still that pro-
duction of pleasure derives from a lowering of tension. Mental activity,

194 Death-Drive
though just as skilled and sensitive and agile as we were portraying

above, now resembles the work of a night watchman who rouses himself
only to dampen down any minor disturbance and restore the stillness
of the night. All stimulus to the mind appears as hostile in that, even
if friendly, it creates agitation that by definition causes it unpleasure
(such hostility-in-friendship would play into Derridas work on related
themes).7
So where does this bias derive? Why an initial condition that presup-
poses hostility rather than amity? Despite the advanced and speculative
nature of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one can still hear in these
issues of stimulus and defence the kind of neurological disposition
toward mental activity that had been Freuds professional bent for
decades beforehand. In such a context, the mind, as a system of neu-
rones, takes on a fundamentally responsive attitude to external stimuli.
By and large, the greater or more unannounced the stimulus, the greater
the minds sensitivity and the greater the subsequent need to reset the
mental machine to zero. Conversely, the more frequent the same kind of
stimulus the more easily received, even if its first advent had been trau-
matic. This is why repetition becomes an ally of pleasure, for regardless
of what gets repeated, malign or benign, repetition is enough by itself
to decrease psychic stress. The mind may experience the same old bad
news as bringing equal pleasure as good new news, and people get very
comfortable with their pain.
Intent on its vigilant lowering of tension that absence of unpleasure
that signals total stillness and silence the pleasure-principle now con-
stitutes a death-drive in everything but name. Or does it? Is the pleasure-
principle actually a death-drive or simply like a death-drive? And if
the latter, what would a death-drive be that is other than the pleasure-
principle, yet similar enough to be likened to it? Or indeed, what if the two
were entirely alien to one another? The quietus for which pleasure inces-
santly strives equates, in Freuds mind, to death. What does this mean?
One of my more persistent challenges to Freud throughout this book has
been that the death indicated by him falls short by some measure. Despite
his likening the death-drive to the Buddhist search for Nirvana where
nibbana means extinction Freud invokes more consistently and more
pointedly the state of simplicity characterised by the single-cell organism.
Nor is this some expedient on Freuds part: when he speaks of the death-
drive and the return to simplicity, he means that human beings, owing
to a phylogenetic imperative, unconsciously wish to go back to that
unicellular state and reap there the benefit of its pleasurable minimum
action, or more precisely the minimum action that must be pleasurable
de facto. A remarkable thesis, but the death referred to does not amount

to extinction. Freud still ringfences the egoic psyche from any aggression
perpetrated by itself upon itself. The violence it nurses will always get
directed externally, and by the same token any hurt it suffers will come
from elsewhere and even that would afford an opportunity for the
reduction of unpleasure and the circling back to stasis.
Now, Freud does not always practise perfect hygiene over the brood
of terms under his guard, and the death-drive, in his vocabulary, will
from time to time get muddled up with the instinct for destruction.
Chapter 4, White Over Red, went into some detail over this question:
when Freud talks about destruction it refers to an aggressive urge aimed
at others, and when he talks about the death-drive it refers mainly to
the phylogenetic or ancestral pull towards quietude. Then there is the
ambiguity (to say the least) in the relation between the death-drive as
Thanatos and the pleasure-principle as life-drive or Eros. At one level,
the conflict between these is more apparent than real, in that both
support psychic preservation both set their sights on maintaining some
core being of the psyche, if we can use such language. The ambiguity
persists, and it is twofold: firstly, the erotic urge, unlike the death-drive,
seeks expansion and unification with others even though, like the death-
drive, a yield of pleasure results from such forays, the character of which
will once more be relatively de-agitated and serene, ergo deathly; and
secondly, even destructive or inimical acts often involve the sensuous
approach to the other that makes it hard to classify them separately
from erotic interest not to mention that the erotic approach to the
other may justifiably be misprised (or judged correctly) as hostile, inas-
much as it will seek to incorporate or annexe that other in a suspiciously
assimilative gesture. At a more ambiguous or complex level still, one
could, where Freud demurs, argue that even the purely destructive,
thanatological instinct, that is the drive to annihilate others, may be
erotic not just in its approach to and contact with the other, but also at
the point of having achieved its aim, that is killing someone or some-
thing else. That is because the destruction of the other can be viewed as
just another mode of incorporation, and thus a gesture of love, no less.
Such ambiguities are not, in psychoanalytic terms, susceptible of reso-
lution and this marks a critical sense in which the order of the psychic
differs from the order of the rational. It may not be rational to speak of
a loving destruction, but psychically the ambiguity holds true.
But what of the drive in the death-drive? Drive translates Trieb very
well indeed they are the same word, as we know, the English converting
the t and the b into d and v, according to the rule. But the translation
sheds no light. Even if one could define the drive satisfactorily, one would
still be left with a classic philosophic problem. Namely, what drives the

196 Death-Drive
drive? And what drives what drives the drive? An infinite regress opens up
like a lift shaft. One might venture that the drive of the death-drive is self-
causing, but that would be to grant agency to an abstraction, even a kind
of transcendental status, that Freud, I think, would veto. Again he favours
a biological or organicist idiom, using death-drive synonymously with
death instincts. The compulsion or underground force suggested by the
drive of the death-drive imbues the instinctual life of human beings as a
species, and it is at the level of the species, precisely, that the drive takes
hold. More accurately, the drive works by affecting the individual human
being with the imperative of the species as if genetically programmed,
as we might say today. That is one way of understanding the drive-ness
of the drive, as the belonging of the individual human to a higher or more
general order of being. We are driven as human beings by belonging to
the order of human beings, perhaps. The belonging, or generic binding,
brings us into the realm of compulsion.
At this point or thereabouts, many critics and commentators part
company with Freud, of course. Its not just the kooky biologism that
rankles, but also the apparent relegation of an otherwise free human
subject to the status of an animal enslaved to phylogenetic urges. My
own objection, and one I have hinted at here and there, pertains more to
the death-drives largely teleological nature, whereby it comes to form
the alpha and omega of human existence, the dust from which we come
and to which we shall return. Like so many of Freuds theses, that of the
death-drive takes the ternary structure of a significant origin followed by
a period of dormancy and an ultimate return to the origin. Wishes, for
example, begin as egoic desires, undergo repression and then reappear,
albeit disguised as symptoms; Freuds work on Moses posits an original
figure, a latency period and a subsequent return in some form; and the
death-drive, following suit, originates with the single organism, evolves
into complex living being and then harks back to its genesis. Of course,
multiple variations and nuances attend the structure, but as a structure
it predominates. One could even argue that a part of the drive-ness of
the drive, a modicum of its force, issues from the circularity itself, for it
lies in the nature of driving to intend towards something and circular-
ity pulls intention forward ipso facto. One effect of such a structure,
of such a grand design shaping our ends, is that it never punctures the
daily experience of human being; it provides an overarching framework,
but as such doesnt impinge in any tangible way. What I have tried to
reason, by contrast, is that the death-drive, even on Freuds own terms
especially on his own terms makes small unanticipated appearances in
a legion of circumstances. In other words, the architecture Freud erects
around the death-drive has a kind of metaphysical security that keeps

that death-drive in order and thus fails to notice the local, random,
disruptive incursions it makes. These are what I have tried to bring out.
Not that Freud doesnt sometimes entertain such wayward epipsy-
chidia. In his work on the repetition compulsion (I refer back to Chapter
5, Literature Repeat Nothing), Freud again introduces a force appar-
ently more powerful than the pleasure-principle, whereby, as mentioned
above, we repeat things in order to avoid the discombobulation asso-
ciated with doing something new. When we do this we are, in effect,
deploying the psychical logic of the death-drive, though Freud prefers to
emphasise the tactical function of repetition in people suffering mental
disorder. These people unconsciously repeat traumatic events they have
experienced either in a displaced form (as symptoms) or in a stylised and
somewhat abstract replaying of the trauma itself, because to relive them
as such or to confront them presents such an overwhelming prospect.
The compulsion to repeat, however, keeps that trauma alive even if it
does come out in distorted form, so that any palliative effect can never
be more than superficial. The link to the death-drive, however, never
becomes that salient in Freuds writing, but to me its critical, and it
manifests itself on at least three counts:
1. Reduction: by repeating something I will among other things be

defraying the considerable cost upon my psychic system of taking on
something new, which means I will be obeying the death-drives
prerogative of keeping psychic outlay to a minimum.
2. Sameness: the lack of variation in my actions or their effects connotes
death inasmuch as it marks a refusal to grow or to change, that is
negating a fundamental affirmation of being as being in time and
with purpose; repetition is anti-life, if you will.
3. Technology: the more repetitious I become, the more regular, pre-
dictable and functional I become as a body, even though as a mind
my dysfunction becomes painfully evident. Obsessive actions display
a mechanical quality, and indeed in a certain real sense repetition
makes a machine, a technical object, out of me. In other words, I
start to look more inanimate than animate.
This last point, about technology, is critical when approaching the

aesthetic, for a formidable link exists, as we were hinting in relation
to Katharina Fritsch, between technology, art and death a link made
visible by Freuds work, though not exhaustively investigated by him.
Behind all these manifestations, just as behind the superordinate
death-drive that transmits at the metapsychological level, an insoluble
element, present in what we were nicknaming the drive-ness of the

198 Death-Drive
drive, endures. The repetition compulsion constitutes a kind of drive

too: the phrase translates Wiederholungszwang where Zwang denotes
compulsion or force. Perhaps it translates in turn the kind of necessity
that we sketched out in relation to freedom of thought an unscaleable
there is-ness. In both cases we are dealing with something difficult not
to express tautologously, yet in both we may isolate a certain priority or
what Derrida might call an affirmation. While the death-drive cannot
not be deathly notwithstanding Freuds rather emollient attitude
nevertheless it is there and it is productive; it has energy and direction;
it holds tension; it tilts forward, so to speak, in its imminence. Even
before it appears as the death-drive (which it never really does), before
it diverts the human species towards its death, because it is a drive it will
have prepared itself, will have affirmed the possibility of the emergence
of something rather than nothing.
No sooner do I say this, however, than I ought to whittle out anything
purposive or teleological to use that term again in such a position-
ing of the death-drive. I do not wish to imply that this meta-drive or
hyper-compulsion has the same conditioning and programmatic voca-
tion as that of the death-drive considered from Freuds phylogenetic per-
spective. The drive-ness of which we are speaking supports, but diverges
from, that agency which magisterially guides the human being back to
its organic destiny, being rather a feature of the death-drive qua drive.
In this regard, the phrase death-drive signals an oxymoron, where the
drive, as a kind of prior acquiescence to action, overrides or at least
vies with the putative inaction of death. Such acquiescence might bear
comparison, moreover, with the structural consent by which I mark my
respect for deaths absolute necessity. If we can speak of a drive, even
knowing that it serves death, then, no matter how far back in the chain,
an unquenchable energy gives itself.
The aesthetic, again
The principal texts under analysis in this book are of course those of
Freud (and various post-Freudians), but with strong representation from
writers such as Heidegger and Derrida, and more than passing refer-
ence to Adorno, De Man, Durkheim, Foucault, Pascal and Nietzsche. In
addition to these, I have looked at a modest range of aesthetic works,
including photography, painting, literature and of course Katharina
Fritschs sculpture. These deserve their place in the possibly unlikely
context of a book about the death-drive neither for being especially
deathly nor especially aesthetic and no doubt countless other works

could have served as well but because in each case I find an intensifi-
cation perhaps exemplary, perhaps not of that nexus I touched on
above, combining the technical, the formal, the repetitious and, yes, the
deathly.
Thats one side of it. The other reason for their inclusion concerns
the quality of the fictional, the rhetorical and the imaginary that they
exhibit, a quality which, in my eyes, contains a neglected yet critical
strain of the death-drive, and it is this that I have placed special emphasis
upon. In short, one can consider the death-drive philosophically, and
one can consider the death-drive psychoanalytically, but its consid-
eration from an aesthetic viewpoint remains, as an approach, compara-
tively immature, and the means of advancing that approach lie on the
two sides just mentioned.
My assumption is that no object devoid of a formal element can claim
aesthetic status which is not to imply that anything with a formal
element must automatically be aesthetic. What do I mean by a formal
element? Well, I distinguish between form and genre. Thus a play
counts as a genre, and a farce counts as a sub-genre of the genre, and a
bedroom farce a sub-genre of the sub-genre. In photography or painting,
a landscape could be a genre. In music, an opera. Within these one might
come across vignettes, or arias, or soliloquies, or adaggios, or epilogues,
or cropping, or flashbacks, and so on, each of which legitimately might
ask to be described as a formal element, at least insofar as each would be
a recognised device. Equally, at a micro level one might encounter ana-
phora, or backlighting, or stichomythia, or glissando, or impasto, each
of which, again, could qualify as a formal element. But what I have in
mind is something less empirical and less technical. By saying aesthetic
works avail themselves of a formal element I mean they are discrete,
bounded or framed in such a way as to affirm their specificity. Just as
they include certain elected or at least hosted elements, so they exclude
others. Their borders will be keen, protective, delimiting; the concentra-
tion of forces at the frame between inside and outside has singular inten-
sity. In this special sense, they are formed. Obviously I wouldnt want
to imply that, at an artistic level, a great deal does not get transacted
between an aesthetic work and what lies beyond it. Paintings allude to
other paintings or texts, a photograph of one place may refer to a second
place, and so on one can be persuaded easily of a multiverse of quota-
tion and intertextuality at this level. But while the aesthetic work finds
itself moored pretty tightly, and by a web of interconnected lines, to all
manner of other texts, agents and events, at the same time that work
will enjoy a detachment deriving precisely from its singularity, from its
bordered-ness and uniquity. The work is nameable and can be singled

200 Death-Drive
out. Even with a text of multiple editions Shakespeares King Lear,

for example the object, as a work, can be named. A couple more
provisos: saying the work tolerates (and perhaps even demands) being
named and singled out, even in the midst of multiple texts like those of
King Lear, or among the various performances, say, of a piece of music,
does not mean it benefits from transcendental or essential qualities. I am
not claiming the nature of a particular work presides above the various
manifestations of it as their truth; I am not positing an inner kernel of
the work in relation to which any edition or performance or representa-
tion would merely append. But if I may make a distinction nevertheless
between such editions and the work they are editions of, I would say
that while the borders of such editions or texts, hospitable or not, may
be quite frangible, the borders of the work to which they relate remain
impassable and clear, and that these function to segregate that work as
distinct despite all the miscegenation on the textual plane from all
others. Thus when we refer to King Lear we refer not only, if academi-
cally informed, to this or that edition, or, if less informed, perhaps to a
generalised King Lear as the net of various encounters with it (reading
it, hearing it quoted, seeing a production or whatever), but also to a
kind of declaration on the part of the work itself that marks itself out
as such: not a secret truth, but an open, if not empirical, declaration of
independence.
What has this got to do with the death-drive? Recall the figure of
Mnch. Fritschs sculpture has the quality of an eternal recurrence an
eternal return of the same whereby, despite the variegated lights new
contexts will shine upon it, this sculpture steadfastly remains this sculp-
ture. At a certain level it cannot absorb those contextual lights, merely
reflect them while it keeps dark. I do not think this unique to Mnch.
Last night, for example, I watched a TV programme about the pyramids
in Peru. Thousands of clay pots have been recovered from the various
sites, most of them decorated with figural art depictions of rituals
and the like. As you might expect, the programme offered contextual
detail from the period in order to help the viewer understand the art in
question. But for all the contextual cladding and the nuances of inter-
pretation and counter-interpretation, one could still detect a this is it
of a particular pot or vase, a kind of pre-empirical ecce announcing
the completeness, even in the case of fragments, of the work. Such an
abiding formal element, which accompanies but stands back from the
stock-exchange of interpretations about it, begins to merit the status
of death-drive on account of its stillness, its intactness, its immutabil-
ity. Once made, the artwork cannot change or grow, even though its
meaning will undergo endless manipulation by and adaptation to the

needs of successive interpreters analysis interminable, to paraphrase

Freud. Or, to paraphrase Melanie Klein, the artwork must be seen as
a dead object, though clearly not in the Kleinian sense the artwork
has been formed, completed and finished; the process of its production
at some point has stopped and left it on its own; it is no longer being
created or nourished. Even in musical performances, which require
the reanimation, so to speak, of the original score, the artwork will be
complete right from before the first bars of the overture. Which is not
to argue, somewhat classically, that each part relates to the whole work
as an aesthetic unity, but rather that the work as a complete object,
and as the issue of its author, regardless of how complex or various that
author might be has fully ripened before the performance. But its exist-
ence, as a mode of completion and detachment from its author, will still
be that of a dead object.
The asymmetry I mentioned at the beginning, between artwork and
beholder/recipient, comes from this. I can recognise an artwork but it
cannot return the favour. The provocation goes one way. The artwork
therefore traces a hermeneutic circle around itself, a cordon sanitaire
which my approach or address to the work will never penetrate. This
does not mean that my hermeneutic interest will meet with any hin-
drance: on the contrary, such interest will not only continue to be
unfettered and after all, how could the artwork itself ever police the
responses and advances towards it? but the very energy for herme-
neutic engagement with it may be sourced from the nec plus ultra of this
dead zone. Because, in other words, I cannot assimilate or comprehend
the deadness of the work and we are a million miles from claiming
that its deadness is some roundabout way of talking about it having an
essence I am moved to respond to it, as if under some injunction to
inculcate life where it is most threatened or barren. Paradoxically, that
deadness, with its own kind of silent voice, actually incites or provokes.
But as deadness, as the completeness it is, it cannot engage with the dia-
logue resulting from the provocation. It hangs heavy and inert, like any
other object.
Within this deadness of the artwork, another engine cuts in, however.
The artwork neither adds nor takes away anything from itself (a feature
I would advocate as definitive), but it lasts. The fact of its being finished,
the fact of its having been let go by its creator(s), means it can suffer
no further dereliction or deterioration. Even if the object itself fades or
decays, is cannibalised, adapted or renovated a crumbling fresco, a
bleached-out celluloid, a cracked altar panel the work lives on as the
unassailable and minimal quantum it has been since its manufacture.
For it has indeed been made, developed in close proximity to the body

202 Death-Drive
of a person or persons, but its making reaches an end after which it is

forever released, like an astronaut cut adrift in space. Such endurance,
such conatus as Spinoza might term it, constitutes the drive of the art-
works death-drive, its striving-in-sameness, its undeviating persistence.
Unfortunately, words like endurance and persistence may point to a
temporal habitat for the artwork, but the quality at hand, the quality
of the drive, pertains less to time it is not a temporal aspect of the
artwork than to its singularity or to its having-stood-out-as-itself. In
short, a drive not to change not because only such a drive could with-
stand the corruptions of time but to be what it is. Once manufactured,
the artwork possesses, like an unresisted will, its endeavour to be the
same as itself. Dont take this as a restatement of the eternal identity of
the ideal aesthetic work, but as something more straightforward: it was
made, it is unique, it will last, even as it changes.
Although my description of the drive-ness of the drive would not nec-
essarily violate that in Freud (I refer you back a few pages), my thesis
regarding the artwork manifestly perverts Freuds statement of the
death-drive on many scores, and not least because the artwork, contrary
to the organicist Freudian model, must number among the least organic
forms imaginable. That madeness of the artwork had to involve an
intervention into or departure from organic or natural creation, as a
specifically man-made, technical, deliberative feat. Artworks dont just
appear, although of course one can appreciate the artistic qualities of
natural phenomena like sunsets or sand dunes, and one can name or
claim nature as art, of course. Aristotle says something along the lines
that the work of art is not necessary or that it could have been other-
wise, which I take to mean not only that it did not have to happen, but
that it is unnatural. The artwork is never called for, so that although,
to pick an example, Picassos Guernica takes its cue very directly from
events in Francoist Spain, and Pablo himself may have felt a powerful
urge personally to comment on them, Guernica, as an artwork if not as
a piece of political critique, lies outside the call of history. It was occa-
sioned by history but not demanded by it. It had to be possible for it to
be created, in other words its contingency was necessary, but contingent
it nevertheless was for having supervened technologically, appeared
artificially, marked an unnatural incursion, as something we could
have lived without.
This is the first sense in which the artwork might be technical, and
already it links to death for, like death, the artwork intrudes into the
order of the organic; even where it represents the organic, even if its
own material be organic (clay pots, for example), the artwork belongs
somewhere other than the order of natural life not that it has a natural

domicile either. (One might contest whether death belongs to the order
of the organic, on the grounds that death arises usually as the result of
an organic process . . . but at the same time one would have to acknowl-
edge such a result takes the form of the annihilation of organic life, even
so.) We could also invoke the more common-sense understanding of
the way in which an artwork might be technical, depending as it does
on the technological skill or technique of its maker but this neednt
detain us here. So again let us recall Katharina Fritschs Mnch, where
we talked about a rhythm of death. The artwork sustains itself without
changing a deeply inorganic capability which speaks to a machine-
like persistence, technical for never diminishing, never wearing itself
out. A kind of infinity inheres in it. At one level, this is deathly because
of the lack of change, as we have said, because of the inertia, involved.
The rhythm of death, however, the formal or technical insistence within
that deathliness, concerns the drive behind it. For the inert, deathly,
inorganic persistence of the artwork requires an energy of sorts and a
constant reaffirmation. It cannot simply persist some form of impera-
tive drives it. An infinite renewal is at play, driving the persistence of the
artwork which, because of the ever-present need for that reaffirmation,
constitutes a kind of rhythm or pulse. The dead beat keeps it going.
So much for the formal/technical side of things. I also flagged up
the fictional, the rhetorical and the imaginary. I make again the point
that death must anyway be fictional. Because death never happens as
such that is, because the most we can witness will be the ending of life
rather than death it never becomes actual. So rather than an actuality,
Heidegger describes it as a possibility. In my terms, this means that it
relates to us as a kind of fiction, accessible only through tropic projection
and imagery, such that we speak and think about death as if it existed,
though it doesnt. Paradoxically this suggests that while death possesses
the ultimate potency of absolute necessity, we have to invent it before it
can be registered. And, as we were saying earlier, the necessity of death
renders it unthinkable anyway, thus shifting us from epistemic appre-
ciation of it towards this more fictive attitude. True, death would still
occur even without this albeit second-order apprehension of it on our
part, but insofar as we can relate to it at all during our lives it requires a
kind of invention to make it (not thinkable, to be sure, but) imaginable.
Death, the final reality, affects us as pure fiction. Immediately, therefore,
it throws itself open to aesthetic reception and manipulation, ready to
be dressed up at the imaginations whim. The power of death has to
work mainly upon the imagination, making its force, the point at which
it touches us, more rhetorical than actual. Indeed, one could defensi-
bly construe death as the most perfectly rhetorical entity we know,

204 Death-Drive
since it furnishes no other presence or representation for us than at the

rhetorical level, where it arms itself with a battery of rhetorical devices.
We should, however, add a clause to the effect that the contrast
between rhetorical and actual is a lot more fuzzy. Death never becomes
actual, for it calls an end to the very order of actuality itself (time,
events, action, etc.), so that its rhetorical nature could never work
as a proxy to that actuality, nor indeed maintain a relationship with
actuality of any kind. Despite the fact that death must be anything but
rhetorical it is nothing but rhetorical, in effect. Nor does this peculiar
quasi-reality stop, in my view, at the rhetorical manifestation of death,
but spreads widely, perhaps everywhere. I would go so far as to say
that not only does death manifest itself in such rhetorical quasi-reality
but that most of our reality might be quasi-real and rhetorical and
that this makes it deathly. The chapter entitled A Harmless Suggestion
fleshed out this hypothesis in terms of psychoanalytic suggestion.
Suggestion generates realities at the level of the imagination, working
rhetorically to persuade a given person or to expedite their self-
persuasion of a particular figuration of (what I hesitate to call) the
real. If I am suggestible, I will countenance and even encourage the rhe-
torical figures and figurations of my life that bring me pleasure and that
I will experience as real or true. Well, there appears to me no reason
why the mechanics of suggestion should be limited to suggestion only.
Insofar as we inhabit socially a psycholinguistic environment saturated
with rhetorical devices and suasory manoeuvres, and, once in it, look
to align external realities with internal pleasure, we may constantly
dwell in the valley of the shadow of suggestion, constantly prone to the
rhetorical or ideological forces forever reinventing and repositioning
us. We develop transient strategic identities at the interstices of tropes,
in other words a situation I would describe as deathly for at least
two reasons. Firstly, if suggestion has the rhetorical power to configure
or reconfigure the identity of any given person in any given moment,
it means that any identity preceding the moment of suggestion lacked
the wherewithal to withstand suggestions insinuating approach. The
identity lacked substance, in other words. Not that the new sugges-
tion bestows any such substance on the contrary, the subject of
suggestion will achieve at best gossamer identities easily dispelled and
replaced by ensuing suggestions. I consider this insubstantiality to be
deathly and the rhetoric of suggestion, perhaps rhetoric in general
as the art of persuasion, implies a destructibility of the subject under
its spell, a deathly breakability furnishing the precondition of its being
able to be reformed as necessary by rhetorics wiles. The art and the
aesthetics of rhetoric need a base in that destructibility of the subject

the beauty of words grows up around that desolation. And secondly,

that deathly seduction by the trope in all its artificiality still works by
pleasure. The Freudian line on suggestion says that we take on sug-
gestion because the content of whats suggested harmonises with some
inner image of our own pleasure. I am revising this line. I say that if
suggestion holds the power to refashion me as and when, then I lose
the link to my own pleasure and to my pleasure-history, so to speak.
But there can still be a pleasure-effect or pleasure-affect without such a
link. Pleasure may work precisely as an interruption of my own history,
and suggestion may cut across rather than coincide with any inner self.
Again, this implies a kind of deathly undoing.
In sum, the rhetoric of death works upon me in two ways, both of
which confuse and blend the realms of aesthetics and ontology. First, for
all its sway over the realm of actuality, death can only ever play upon
us at a rhetorical (and to that extent, aesthetic) level. Second, the field of
language I find myself in the sociolinguistic field, for want of a better
term will be criss-crossed everywhere by suggestion and persuasion, the
consequences of which are profound: suggestion and persuasion depend
on a reinventability and structural openness of the person (or subject)
they work upon, an openness that is on the one hand generative and
creative, but on the other hand violent and terminal.
It occurs to me that there might be both conservative and radical read-
ings of what I have written in this Postscript. In what I speak of as the
respect for death, as the affirmative drive-ness of the drive and as the
bordered formality of the artwork, my reader might well see a series of
transcendental essays at anchoring a set of properly unruly discourses
philosophy, psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Another reader, however,
might see in the same place an almost delinquent empiricism that puffs
up the obvious like the fact that an artwork has been made by an
artist in order to blow those discourses far off course. Whichever it is, I
think both derive in turn from what I would call the no remote control
effect of the death-drive. Our fundamental, and perhaps distinguishing,
capability as human beings to control and manipulate things from a
greater or lesser distance reaches its limit in the case of death which is
both infinitely close to and infinitely far from us at the same time. No
active, technological, controlling, human distance can be installed by us
between us and it. It rushes everywhere before and behind that wished-
for distance. Strangely, however, this infinity of death (the death-drive
perhaps would be the name of that infinite rushing) that streams around
us and defeats any remote control of it on our part, also leaves us, by
the same token, completely free. Because we cannot control it at any
distance we are free from it; the death-drive confers upon us both radical

206 Death-Drive
bondage and this radical freedom. Within it, we are constantly walking
away from it. What I hope this book has done is give some expression
to that experience.
Notes
1. Specifically I am referring to Jacques Derridas Mmoires pour Paul de Man
(Paris: Galile, 1988).
2. W. B. Yeats, The Statues, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London and
Basingstoke: Papermac, 1982), pp. 3756.
3. Paul Celan, The Meridian, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop, in Paul Celan:
Collected Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 3755; Walter Benjamin,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. Harry
Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books,
1968), pp. 217251.
4. The sculpture also forms part of a trilogy or trinity with two other of
Fritschs works. These are Hndler (Dealer), 2001, and Doktor (Doctor),
1999.
5. See, for example, the essay Signature Event Context, in Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), esp. p. 317.
6. SE, XVIII, p. 7.
7. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de lamiti (Paris: Galile, 1994).

Index
la recherche du temps perdu beauty, 101, 104

(Proust), 36 Beckett, Samuel, 1667
absence of unpleasure, 22, 92, 153, photograph (Minihan), 173,
154, 194 1759
acting out, 118, 11921 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 51
action, 136 Being and Time (Heidegger), 41, 43
actuality, 379, 41, 42, 44, 203 Being-towards-death, 3940, 42
Adorno, Theodore, 17, 198 Being-towards-Pleasure, 149
thought and, 503, 579, 64 beliefs, 161, 1634
aesthetics, 205, 99, 104, 1834, Benjamin, Walter, 50, 182
197, 198206 Bersani, Leo, 123, 1279
literature and, 110, 114, 11823, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
1301 (Freud), 3, 4, 6, 11, 18, 192,
aggression, 96, 195 194
instinct for, 8, 15, 95 creativity and, 115, 121, 127
anamnesis see remembering errors and, 88, 89
Anderson, Perry, 59, 60 state of rest and, 167
apocryphal figuration, 45 suicide and, 69
Archive Fever (Derrida), 93, 95, 97, thought and, 49, 58
98, 99100 Big Bang theory, 49
archiviolithic, 101, 104 Blade Runner (film), 61
Aristotle, 50, 202 Blake, William, 82
artworks, 225, 1702, 197, Bloom, Harold, 95
198203 Bollas, Christopher, 11315
for arts sake, 1016 Boothby, Richard, 11, 13
deadness of, 201 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 1434,
persistence of, 168 1437, 154
radioactivity of, 1667 bourgeoisie, 53
sculpture, 180 commercialism, 589
style, 1823 self alienation, 50
as technological constructs, 179 thought, 52, 53, 57
avoidance of unpleasure, 191, 193 breathing, 1812
Brown, Norman O., 1516
Barthes, Roland, 52, 177 Bchner, Georg, 67
beating-phantasies, 679 Burke, Edmund, 54

208 Death-Drive
Celan, Paul, 182 death

certainty, 312, 41 concept of, 1834
chance, 64 as a law, 1879
change, 51 memory of, 104
time and, 168 non-appearance of, 1801, 1845,
chaos theory, 192 187
Child is Being Beaten (Freud), 67, onceness of, 2930, 38, 45
69, 70 rhythm of, 183, 203
childrens games, 1013, 110 surplus of, 16, 26n
Civilisation and Its Discontents death-instinct, 5, 35, 69, 712, 196
(Freud), 15, 94 creativity and, 1223, 126
Clark, Timothy, 110, 112, 113, errors and, 93, 945, 101, 106
123 Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy), 43
cogito, 147, 148 debt, 190
compulsion, 196 Defoe, Daniel, 56
repetition, 48, 54, 1201, 1978 DeLillo, Don, 43
conatus, 202 depressive state, 11
Concept of the Political (Schmitt), Derrida, Jacques, 1113, 18, 29, 37,
162 40, 45, 65
condition, mans, 31, 86 affirmation and, 198
consciousness, 489, 51, 57, 60 comparative analysis, 1716
Consciousness, 154 creativity and, 123, 12531
critique of, 146 errors and, 902, 93101, 1045
contemporaneity, 1667 hostility, friendship and, 194
contingency, 29, 3940, 43, 90 light and, 166
error of, 104 speech and, 1856
Copernicus, 143 suggestion and, 149
Cracking Up: The Work of Descartes, Ren, 57, 146, 147, 148
Unconscious Experience (Bollas), desire, 14, 18, 64, 143
113, 114 private history of, 63
Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming destruction, 8, 9, 14, 16, 19, 20
(Freud), 110, 115, 116 errors and, 92, 96, 98
creativity, 108, 11114, 120, 123, instinct for, 195
130 self-, 967
creative writing, 10910 suicide and, 71
Dionysian, 1234 destructive power, 97
Critchley, Simon, 18 destructiveness, 10, 94, 95
critique, 144 diffrance, 1256
of consciousness, 146 Dionysian creativity, 1234
of ego, 146 Discipline and Punish (Foucault),
cruelty, 98101 77
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 113 disguise, 110
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 128 displacement, 23, 114
disturbances, 168
Dasein, 30, 37, 38, 149 docile bodies, 767
day-dreaming, 110, 114 Dream, Phantasy and Art (Segal),
de Man, Paul, 29, 37, 40, 42, 456, 112
63, 198 Dreams and Occultism (Freud), 137,
De Quincey, Thomas, 135 139

Index 209
Dreamwork Does Not Think estivation, 48

(Lyotard), 48 tats dme de la psychanalyse
Duino Elegies (Rilke), 31 (Derrida), 93, 97, 100
Durkheim, Emile, 735, 198 eternity, 31
dyschronic link, 36 evolution, 4
expansion, 149
economic problem, 3, 7 expenditure, 1246
Economic Problem of Masochism
(Freud), 77 failed sublimation, 84
economy, restricted, 125 fantasy, 110
crits (Lacan), 14 beating-phantasies, 679
ego, 2, 3, 171 of dialectical thought, 59
critique of, 146 theory of, 85
egoism, 73 time-as-, 58
as subject, 142, 1468 fiction, 25, 45, 199, 203
suicide and, 713, 74, 101 force, 345, 412, 44, 69, 78, 196,
thought and, 1867 1978
see also Ich; superego of possibility, 378
Ego and the Id (Freud), 71, 74, forcelessness, 44
923, 94 fore-pleasure, 110
Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, forgettability, 32, 39, 43
Mimesis and Affect forgetting, 325, 62, 155
(Borch-Jacobsen), 144, 147, 154 formal element, 182, 199200, 203
End of History and the Last Man Fort-Da game, 12, 14, 146
(Fukuyama), 59
Ends of History (Anderson), 59 Foucault, Michel, 17, 7680, 143,
Enduring Love (McEwan), 1089, 198
114 Four Fundamental Concepts of
enlightenment Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 145
advancement as, 59 free association, 85
Enlightenment, 524, 56, 57, 62 freedom of thought, 1878, 18990
features of, 501 Freudian slips, 82, 859, 91, 100,
unenlightened, 52 103, 105
equilibrium, 59 Freudian Subject (Borch-Jacobsen),
Eros, 6, 7, 15, 17, 21, 99, 195 144
Eros and Civilisation (Marcuse), 16 Fritsch, Katharina, 1801, 183, 184,
erotic simulacrum, 96, 104 193, 197, 198, 200
errors, 82107 Fukuyama, Francis, 5960, 612, 64
artworks for arts sake, 1016
cruelty and, 98101 fundamental concepts, 1445
of death, 93
Freudian slips, 82, 859, 91, 100, genre, 70
103, 105 form and, 199
literature and, 1312 law of, 65
perfect, 86 sonnets, 11617
psyche and, 823, 8593, 95, ghosts, 172, 1734
989, 1001, 103 Gibbon, Edward, 53, 60
repression and, 83, 84, 8691 goal-seeking, 74
unique, 103 graphology, 13742, 151

210 Death-Drive
gratification, 34, 17; see also inept sublimation, 84

wish-fulfilment inspiration, 112
gratuitousness, 202 instinct, 88
Guernica (Picasso), 202 for aggression, 8, 15, 95
guilt, 68, 778, 100 contempt for, 52
for destruction, 95, 195
Hacking, Ian, 55 life-instinct, 145
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 108, 166, see also death-instinct
1712, 1735 interpretation, 171
haunting, 172, 1734 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 48,
hauntology, 18, 19 82
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, intertextuality, 104
14, 16, 61, 104, 123, 125
suggestion and, 143, 147, 149, Jung, Carl, 7
151, 162
Heidegger, Martin, 2, 18, 30, 35, Kant, Immanuel, 49, 51, 99, 188
3744, 198 Kierkegaard, Siren, 189
deaths withdrawal, 185 King Lear (Shakespeare), 200
errors and, 96, 100, 105 Klein, Melanie, 1013, 112, 201
possibility and, 203 knowledge, 767, 801
subjectivity and, 147 power and, 767, 789
Heraclitus, 134
hibernation, 48 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 1315, 19, 143,
history, 49, 54, 58, 5960, 623, 1457, 1501
78 language, 545, 57, 205
History of Sexuality (Foucault), 17, literary, 1278
79 Language of Psychoanalysis
Hlderlin, Friedrich, 31 (Pontalis), 146
hostility-in-friendship, 194 Laplanche, Jean, 10, 16, 18, 146
Hume, David, 53 law
Husserl, Edmond, 91 death as, 1889
hysteria, theory of, 145 freedom of thought and, 1878
liberal capitalism, 59, 60
Ich, 2, 14855, 159 libido, 17, 109, 116, 150
Ich-subject, 15661 life
see also ego breathing and, 1812
identity death and, 181, 182, 185
artworks and, 167, 168 death and pleasure, 69, 74, 86,
Ich, 153 989
Ich-subject, 158 errors and, 86, 87
Macbeths, 1356 as hibernation, 48
self-, 162, 1678 lifedeath, 12
suggestion and, 1412 origins of, 8
image objects, 434 pleasure and, 67, 21
imagination, 25, 58, 199, 203, self-identity and, 168
204 tension as, 65
impulse, 112, 116, 118, 121 life-instinct, 145
indebtedness, 190 Life Against Death (Brown),
individualism, 756, 113 1516

Index 211
light, 166 Modes of Political and Historical

psychoanalysis and, 169 Time in Early 18th Century
reproduction, 176 England (Pocock), 54
still, 176, 1779 Mnch (Fritsch), 180, 181, 183, 193,
time and, 175 200
literature, 1020, 10832, 198 Montaigne, Michel de, 29, 32
aesthetic and, 110, 114, 11823, mortality, 86, 181
1301 built-in, 87
content, 128 mourning, 43, 45
creativity, 108, 10910, 11114, Mourning and Melancholia (Freud),
120, 123, 130 70
language, 1278 murder, 74, 75
obsession, 11417, 119, 121 Macbeth and, 136
repetition and, 114, 11623, 131
style, 12931 Nachtrglichkeit (iek), 43
Locke, John, 54 necessity, 3940, 43, 1889
logic, 186 negative moment, 147
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 48 neurosis, 100, 115, 116
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 40, 42, 45,
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 1347, 48, 189, 198
1556, 165, 166, 1725 creativity and, 1235, 127, 129
McEwan, Ian, 198 repression and, 111
madness, 13 suggestion and, 155
manners, 54 1984 (Orwell), 186
Mao II (DeLillo), 43 nirvana, 4, 194
Marcuse, Herbert, 1617, 143 non-self-coincidence, 172, 1745
Marx, Karl, 17, 57, 1712 non-self-identity, 167
masochism, 3, 7, 25n, 127, 129 Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional
errors and, 89 Neurosis (Freud), 115, 116
suicide and, 6770, 72, 74, 778
mediacy, space of, 169 obligation, 345
melancholia, 72 absolute, 33
Mmoires pour Paul de Man observance, 190
(Derrida), 173 obsession, 11417, 119, 121
memory, 62 Obsessive Actions and Religious
anamnesis, 61 Practices (Freud), 116
of death, 104 Oedipal fact, 57
Ich and, 1545 Oedipal phase, 49, 54, 62
of people, 181 Oedipal pressure, 50
private, 63, 65 Oedipus complex, 10, 77
theory of, 153 On Textual Understanding (Szondi),
see also forgetting; remembering 29
Meridian (Celan), 182 onceness of death, 2930, 38, 45
Minihan, John, 173, 175 Opinion, 56
Minima Moralia (Adorno), 50, Orwell, George, 186
512
mirror-stage, 147 painting, 198, 199
mistakes see errors White Over Red (Rothko), 101,
model sublimation, 84 102, 103, 105

212 Death-Drive
paranoid state, 11 power, 29

parapraxes see Freudian slips destructive, 97
Pascal, Blaise, 306, 37, 44, 189, 198 knowledge and, 767, 789
Pavlov, Ivan, 48 possibility and, 37
perfect error, 86 of suggestion, 135
perfectibilarian thinking, 62 suggestion of, 135
persuasion, 15861, 205 technology of, 80
phantasy see fantasy see also force
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), preservation, 92
123 drive, 124
photographs, 166, 173, 1759, self-, 100, 1245
1989 prison, 80
phylogenetics, 52, 1212, 125, 126, function, 768
194, 198 unconscious imprisonment, 113
theories of, 10 privacy, 79
Picasso, Pablo, 202 private/public forms, 117
place promise, 403, 45
notion of, 150 transcendental, 414
placeless, 153 prophecy, 134, 135, 136, 137, 156,
Plato, 25, 50, 61, 131 165
pleasure Proust, Marcel, 36
aesthetic, 22 psyche, 23, 36, 49
artwork and, 103 aggression and, 195
Being-towards-Pleasure, 149 creativity and, 111, 114, 117, 122,
compromised, 158 1223
fore-pleasure, 110 errors and, 823, 8591, 93, 95,
Ich and, 150, 152 979, 1001, 103
life, death and, 69, 74, 86, 989 logic and, 186
origins of, 1534 placidity, 124
psychoanalysis and, 21 preservation, 71
science and, 1401 programming, 118
self-representation and, 147 techniques of repression, 168
taking of, 155 time and, 16970, 174
pleasure principle, 157, 169, 192 Unconscious and, 154
beyond, 49, 13 wish-fulfilment and, 169
creativity and, 1224 Psycho-Analytic Play Technique
death-drive and, 1945 (Klein), 10
see also wish-fulfilment psychoanalysis, 78, 10, 12, 21, 36
Pocock, John Greville Agard, 538, artworks and, 1834
60 creativity and, 108, 111, 113, 124
police intelligence, 79 errors and, 82, 85, 87, 94
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 16, 146 logic and, 186
possibility, 3640, 41, 203 subject/subjectivity and, 1426,
of change, 51 1502, 159, 162
condition of, 53 suicide and, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 191
of cruelty, 99 thought and, 4852, 57, 60, 63, 64
psyche and, 87 Unconscious and, 16970
soft, 38 vs graphology, 13842
Post Card (Derrida), 91 wish-fulfilment and, 192

Index 213
Psychopathology of Everyday Life risk, 34, 645, 164

(Freud), 82 rituals, 183, 190
public time, 49, 54, 56 religious practice, 116, 121, 163,
public/private forms, 117 183
Rose, Jacqueline, 12
radioactivity of artworks, 1667 Rothko, Mark, 101, 102, 103, 105
ratio, thought as, 50, 512, 58, 59 Royle, Nicholas, 18
rationality, 59
real time, 56, 58 sadism, 23, 8, 10, 68, 702, 78
reality, 14, 23, 24 sado-masochism, 78
reality principle, 3, 6, 1617 St Paul, 32
reason, 186 sake, for own, 1001
Reception Theory, 171 artworks, 1016
recidivism, 64 sameness, 197
recognition, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 189
re-creations, 120 scepticism, 63
reduction, 197 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
religious practice, 116, 121, 163, 19
183 Schmitt, Carl, 1624
remembering, 325, 39, 43, 61 scientific thinking, 2930
Remembering, Repeating and sculpture, 1803, 193, 198, 200
Working-Through (Freud), secrets
117 private, 79
repetition, 1819, 501, 157 secret wishes, 13840, 1512, 154,
ally of pleasure, 194 156
compulsion, 48, 54, 1201, Segal, Hanna, 11213, 114, 1212
1978 self-destruction, 967, 125; see also
creativity and, 114, 11623, 131 suicide
impersonality of, 118 self-identity, 162, 1678
play as, 1112 self-knowledge, 79
risk-averse, 645 self-preservation, 100, 1245, 149
sculpture and, 183 self-representation, 1478, 150
representation, 147 sex, 6, 7, 1718
self-, 1478 sexual love, 68
repression, 16, 17, 19, 39, 68 sexuality, 17, 77, 7980
creativity and, 111, 113, 116, 117 aesthetic pleasure and, 110
errors and, 83, 84, 8691 as masochism, 127
suggestion and, 146, 1546, 160 repressed, 116
techniques of, 168 Shakespeare, William, 1667, 1712,
wish, 11011, 134, 151 200
respect, 334, 64, 190 silence, 95, 1945
rest, 1756 singularity of death, 2930
state of, 167 slip of death, 91
restricted economy, 125 slips of tongue, 82, 859, 91, 100,
Return of Martin Guerre (film), 152 103, 105
rhetoric, 456, 15861, 199, 2035 Smith, Adam, 53
rhythm of death, 183, 203 social time, 54, 58
Ricoeur, Paul, 40, 42 sociology, 736, 77, 78, 79, 80
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 31 Socrates, 32

214 Death-Drive
sonnets, 11617, 119 Tempest (Shakespeare), 150

Sophocles, 7 Thanatos and Eros, 6, 7, 21, 99, 195
space of mediacy, 169 Thessalonians (St Pauls letter), 32
spectre, concept of, 172 thought, 4866
speculation, 548, 136 aesthetic and, 11920
Spinoza, Baruch, 202 of death, 18490
stillness, 1756, 1945 freedom of, 1878, 18990
seeking, 4 history and, 49, 54, 58, 5960,
still light, 176, 1779 623
Strachey, James, 82, 94, 137 Macbeth and, 1367, 155
style, artwork, 1823 speculation, 548
style, literary, 12931 thinking resistance, 188
implements of, 1301 time and, 4850, 54, 56, 58, 603
subject, 1467, 162, 1634 see also enlightenment
concept of, 1434 three-named drive, 95
Ich, 14855 time
Ich-subject, 15661 change and, 168
see also ego death and, 2
subjectivism, 144 light over, 166
subjectivity, 143, 146, 1478, 150, non-self-coincidence and, 172,
163 1745
concept of, 113 out of, 135
sublimation, 15, 50, 70, 109, 159, psyche and, 170
169 thought and, 4850, 54, 56, 58,
types of, 84 603
suggestion, 13465, 2045 time-as-fantasy, 58
graphology, 13742 timelessness, 168, 172
Ich-subject, 15661 Tolstoy, Leo, 43
ideology, 1602, 164 tragedy, 165
subject/subjectivity, 14256 transcendental factors, 414, 93
suicide, 13, 4, 8, 6781, 191 transference, 145
Macbeth and, 136 transition, 53, 57
masochism and, 6770, 72, 74, persistence of, 54
778 trauma, 119
sadism, 68, 702, 78 preservations of, 114
Suicide (Durkheim), 74
Sulloway, Frank, 8, 19 ber-Ich see superego
superego, 16971 Uncanny, The (Freud), 18, 120,
suicide and, 723, 74, 77, 78 122
Superego, 159, 160 unconscious, 119, 1912
Szondi, Peter, 29 concept of, 184
freedom/imprisonment, 113
tactful society, 501, 52 Unconscious
Taming of Chance (Hacking), 55 errors and, 845, 87, 8991, 100
technology, 612, 174, 176, 182, fundamental concepts and, 145
1978 Ich and, 152
of power, 80 psychoanalysis and, 16970
technical artwork, 2023 repressed material and, 146
technical control, 190 wishes and, 151, 154

Index 215
unpleasure, 194 function of, 90

absence of, 22, 92, 153, 154, 194 Macbeth and, 137, 1556
avoidance of, 191, 193 pleasure and, 157
repetition and, 117
Virtue, Commerce and History repressed, 11011, 134, 151
(Pocock), 53 secret, 13840, 1512, 156
visit, 1801, 183, 185 suggested, 153, 159
Voltaire, 166 tension and, 122
wish-fulfilment, 34, 86, 92, 155,
Weber, Max, 56, 60 167
Wesley, John, 56 language of, 55
White Over Red (Rothko), 101, 102, mediating, 169
103, 105 suicide and, 70
Why War (Freud), 15 thought and, 4950, 61, 62, 64
Will to permanence, 171 Work of Art in an Age of
Winnicott, Donald, 11 Mechanical Reproduction
wishes, 21, 22, 196 (Benjamin), 182
bringing to light, 140, 1512,
155 Yeats, William Butler, 182
death and, 142
dislocation of, 153 iek, Slavoj, 43, 612


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The Frontiers of Theory

The Frontiers of Theory

Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Robert Rowland Smith

Edinburgh University Press

Approximate Pantone colours: Light green 5513, spine 5473

SMITH PRELIMS (M2033).indd iSMITH PRELIMS (M2033).indd i 21/12/09 13:10:3521/12/09

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan

The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger,

Dream I Tell You

Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius

Insister of Jacques Derrida

Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of

Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Reading and Responsibility

Of Jews and Animals

The Romantic Predicament

The Book I Do Not Write

The Paul de Man Notebooks

Veering: A Theory of Literature

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Robert Rowland Smith

Edinburgh University Press

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Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in Adobe Sabon

ISBN 978 0 7486 4039 3 (hardback)

The right of Robert Rowland Smith Ltd

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Mark Rothko, White Over Red (1957) 102

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For the illustration in Chapters 4 and 7 and the Postscript I am grateful

Chapter 7: Samuel Beckett, photographed by John Miniham (1985)

Postscript: Katharina Fritsch, Mnch (1999) DACS 2009.

I dedicate the book to the memory of Jacques Derrida.

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Several chapters have appeared in earlier versions:

The most frequent reference throughout the book is to the following

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exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters

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their ability to outlive their creator, is possibly axiomatic: so what is

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understand, so in effect repetition acts as a kind of blocker to think-

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Everything that lives, dies. Equally for it doesnt follow everything

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themselves that someone else has of them a damning, spiteful picture

Beyond the pleasure principle

Pleasure consists in the fulfilling of wishes, and once a wish is fulfilled,

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this abatement that pleasure may be defined. Rather than excitation,

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of a drive begins to earn its appropriateness: it wont be controlled by

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